Jaroslav Kalfar. (2017). Spaceman of Bohemia. Little, Brown and Company.

Jaroslav Kalfar. 2017. Spaceman of Bohemia. Little, Brown and Company.

Jaroslav Kalfar, Spaceman of Bohemia. Little, Brown and Company, 2017.

Jaroslav Kalfar. Spaceman of Bohemia. Little, Brown and Company, 2017.

OverDrive Product Record

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   • fileAs: Kalfar, Jaroslav
   • bioText: Jaroslav Kalfar was born and raised in Prague, Czech Republic, and immigrated to the United States at the age of fifteen. He earned an MFA at New York University, where he was a Goldwater Fellow and a nominee for the inaugural E. L. Doctorow Fellowship. He lives in Brooklyn. This is his first novel.
     
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An intergalactic odyssey of love, ambition, and self-discovery.
Orphaned as a boy, raised in the Czech countryside by his doting grandparents, Jakub Prochv°zka has risen from small-time scientist to become the country's first astronaut. When a dangerous solo mission to Venus offers him both the chance at heroism he's dreamt of, and a way to atone for his father's sins as a Communist informer, he ventures boldly into the vast unknown. But in so doing, he leaves behind his devoted wife, Lenka, whose love, he realizes too late, he has sacrificed on the altar of his ambitions.
Alone in Deep Space, Jakub discovers a possibly imaginary giant alien spider, who becomes his unlikely companion. Over philosophical conversations about the nature of love, life and death, and the deliciousness of bacon, the pair form an intense and emotional bond. Will it be enough to see Jakub through a clash with secret Russian rivals and return him safely to Earth for a second chance with Lenka?...

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An intergalactic odyssey of love, ambition, and self-discovery.
Orphaned as a boy, raised in the Czech countryside by his doting grandparents, Jakub Prochv°zka has risen from small-time scientist to become the country's first astronaut. When a dangerous solo mission to Venus offers him both the chance at heroism he's dreamt of, and a way to atone for his father's sins as a Communist informer, he ventures boldly into the vast unknown. But in so doing, he leaves behind his devoted wife, Lenka, whose love, he realizes too late, he has sacrificed on the altar of his ambitions.
Alone in Deep Space, Jakub discovers a possibly imaginary giant alien spider, who becomes his unlikely companion. Over philosophical conversations about the nature of love, life and death, and the deliciousness of bacon, the pair form an intense and emotional bond. Will it be enough to see Jakub through a clash with secret Russian rivals and return him safely to Earth for a second chance with Lenka?
Rich with warmth and suspense and surprise, Spaceman of Bohemia is an exuberant delight from start to finish. Very seldom has a novel this profound taken readers on a journey of such boundless entertainment and sheer fun.
"A frenetically imaginative first effort, booming with vitality and originality . . . Kalfar's voice is distinct enough to leave tread marks."-Jennifer Senior, New York Times

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reviews

1. • premium: False
   • source: Jason Heller, NPR
   • content: Spaceman of Bohemia gets heavy-but the story, like its protagonist, flies along weightlessly. A book like this lives and dies on the strength of its first-person voice, and in that regard, Kalfar triumphs. Jakub may be self-absorbed, but he's also charming, funny, and endearingly sympathetic.
2. • premium: False
   • source: Hari Kunzru, New York Times Book Review
   • content: In Jaroslav Kalfar's zany first novel . . . the spaceman, the alien, and all the rest of the book's extravagant conceptual furniture are merely metaphors for the human-scale issues that are its real concerns, in particular the collapse of Jakub's marriage to Lenka. That's not to say Kalfar hasn't done his research. There are lovingly detailed passages on the minutiae of life in zero gravity, but all the whizzy space business is harnessed to the basic question of what it means to leave and whether it's possible to come back. The alien acts as a Proustian trigger for Jakub's memories . . . But for all the strangeness of outer space, it is the writing about his home village, the place to which he longs to return and perhaps never can, that beats strongest in this wry, melancholy book.
3. • premium: False
   • source: Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal
   • content: These include floating free inside the dust cloud and hitching a ride on a clandestine Russian space shuttle. The book suggests that every national hero has a dark side, though you may have to leave Earth to see it.
4. • premium: False
   • source: Caroline Leavitt, San Francisco Chronicle
   • content: Spaceman of Bohemia represents the fiery, funny launch of an exciting new voice. Jaroslav Kalfar, like a good literary astronaut, finds levity in gravity, and vice versa.
5. • premium: False
   • source: Sam Lipsyte, New York Times bestselling author of The Ask
   • content: Spaceman of Bohemia should win many fans. With its interplanetary shenanigans and lessons in Czech history, this zany satirical debut is bursting at the seams.
6. • premium: False
   • source: Tibor Fischer, Guardian UK
   • content: A supercharged, voice-driven romp.
7. • premium: False
   • source: Meredith Turits, Extra Crispy
   • content: Blend Bradbury and Lem with Saint-Exupéry and perhaps a little Kafka, and you get this talky, pleasing first novel by Czech immigrant writer Kalfar....a book built on sly, decidedly contrarian humor. Blending subtle asides on Czech history, the Cold War, and today's wobbly democracy, Kalfar's confection is an inventive, well-paced exercise in speculative fiction. An entertaining, provocative addition to the spate of literary near-future novels that have lately hit the shelves.
8. • premium: False
   • source: Kirkus Reviews
   • content: Spaceman of Bohemia is an out-of-this-world look at all our beautiful smallnesses, from the cells of our biology to the bacterial minutiae of one broken heart. The roar of revolution and governmental injustice is cast against the depths of our emotions and the bottomless, grateful silence of the stars. Jaroslav Kalfar has spun an unforgettable tale, a poignant interplanetary work that collapses the distance between us with the beauty of its language and the unstoppable wonder of this universe he's created.
9. • premium: False
   • source: Samantha Hunt, author of Mr. Splitfoot
   • content: Spaceman of Bohemia is the best, most enjoyably heartbreaking, most fun book you'll read this year. On the surface, you'll see affinities with Gary Shteyngart, with The Martian, with Kelly Link. But Jaroslav Kalfar's voice is entirely his own. I beg you: take this strange, hilarious, profound, life-affirming trip into literary outer space.
10. • premium: False
    • source: Darin Strauss, National Book Critics Circle Award winner for Half a Life
    • content: Spaceman of Bohemia is a wise and elegant work composed of its own unique ethereal grace-a hauntingly beautiful story of solitude, hope, family, and love that transcends, uplifts, carries the reader away.
11. • premium: False
    • source: Dinaw Mengestu, author of The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears
    • content: Spaceman of Bohemia is unforgettable: a work of breathtaking scope and heart, and a reflection of humanity that's raw and strange and profound and true.
12. • premium: False
    • source: Lisa McInerney, author of The Glorious Heresies, winner of the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction
    • content: An exhilarating concoction of history, social commentary, and irony. Reading like Arthur C. Clarke's 2001 crossed with a Milan Kundera novel, set in a Philip K. Dick universe, with a nod to Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis, it manages to be singularly compelling while still providing mass appeal. Highly recommended.
13. • premium: False
    • source: Library Journal (starred review)
    • content: Kalfar's writing has the same hyperactivity, and fidgety contempt for generic boundaries, as that of the young Safran Foer.... Part space opera, part folk tale, his novel is also a love song to the city of Prague.... Funny, humane and...
14. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      January 30, 2017
      A Czech astronaut travels to an interstellar dust cloud in an attempt to redeem his family name in this wonderfully jubilant and touching debut novel. Beginning with the launch of the spaceship JanHus1, the novel promptly flashes back to explore the complex motivations of the titular spaceman, Jakub Prochazka. The son of a Communist sympathizer who tortured dissidents, Jakub chooses to leave his beloved homeland and wife, Lenka, to bring renown to the oft-overlooked Czech Republic. Once in space, Jakub encounters a possibly hallucinated alien spider named Hanus, who interrogates him on philosophies both existential and personal. Through their conversations, Jakub is forced to confront Lenka’s new, seemingly happier life without him, as well as the ghosts of his father’s violent past. Their debates come to a head in the dust cloud Chopra, where Jakub must risk his mission, earthbound life, and contact with Hanus. Written in an erudite comic style, the novel boldly switches tones like a spacesuit built for multiple planetary atmospheres: from the historical to the domestic, from out-of-this-world fables to brutal terrestrial reality. Agent: Marya Spence, Janklow & Nesbit Associates.

15. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      December 15, 2016
      Blend Bradbury and Lem with Saint-Exupery and perhaps a little Kafka, and you get this talky, pleasing first novel by Czech immigrant writer Kalfar. Jakub Prochazka--his name, he insists, is "common" and "simple"--is a man of numerous fears, including caterpillars and the possibility of an afterlife, "as in the possibility that life could not be escaped." An astrophysicist with a beautiful if increasingly estranged wife and a father with a fraught past, Jakub is now pushing the moral equivalent of a giant space broom, collecting cosmic dust for analysis up in the skies on a path to Venus, where the first astronaut from the Czech Republic can stake a claim to space for a nation that the world confuses with Chechnya or, in the words of a powerful technocrat, "reduces us to our great affinity for beer and pornography." The new world in the sky yields many mysteries, among them an arachnoid spider with whom Jakub, whom the creature calls "skinny human," has extensive conversations about all manner of things even as events on Earth unfold in ever stranger ways; his wife, Lenka, now has a police tail, and Jakub's wish to reconcile and produce offspring seems increasingly unlikely. And why does he wish to reproduce? So that, he answers when the creature asks, he reduces the odds of being a nobody, one of many nicely Kafkaesque nods in a book built on sly, decidedly contrarian humor. Whether the Nutella-loving creature is really there or some sort of imagined projection ("A hallucination could not be full of thoughts that had never occurred to me, could it?") remains something of a mystery, but Jakub's torments and mostly good-natured if baffled responses to them are the real meat of the story. Blending subtle asides on Czech history, the Cold War, and today's wobbly democracy, Kalfar's confection is an inventive, well-paced exercise in speculative fiction. An entertaining, provocative addition to the spate of literary near-future novels that have lately hit the shelves.

      COPYRIGHT(2016) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

16. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      February 15, 2017
      The Iron Curtain has fallen, and the Czech Republic is hoping to keep its dark history squarely in the rear-view mirror. A space program exploring Chopra, a mysterious gassy giant near Venus, promises to be just the ticket. The country rests its hopes on the shaky shoulders of Jakub Prochazka, an astrophysicist who signs on only as reparation for his father's sins as a Communist collaborator. Looking to rewrite his personal history, Jakub becomes the country's first astronaut, traveling aboard the JanHus1 in the spring of 2018 to conduct experiments on Chopra. Unfortunately, even space can't untether Jakub from more earthly concerns. Jakub's marriage to Lenka, frayed as it already has been, is further tested. The unwitting astronaut explores existential questions with his own version of Tom Hanks' Wilson, a creature he names Hanu. Cutting to memorable scenes set in small-town Czechoslovakia and, later, in Prague, Kalfar's absurdist debut eloquently explores the crushing burden of having to carry your father's sins and its effects on a man whose sole ambition was to live an ordinary existence.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)

17. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      November 1, 2016
      

      Czech scientist--turned--big-time astronaut Jakub Prochazka undertakes a dangerous solo mission to Venus and ends up talking to a giant, possibly imaginary spider. The Little, Brown folks call this debut brilliant; with a 50,000-copy first printing.

      Copyright 2016 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

18. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      February 1, 2017
      

      Debut novelist Kalfar offers the near-future tale of the first Czech space mission, designed to explore an enigmatic cosmic dust cloud located somewhere between Venus and Earth. Lone spaceman Jakub Prochazka has always struggled with the burden of being the child of a former party member and operative for the Soviet-backed Communist regime, and this story alternates between the present-day space adventure and Jakub's life before and after the Velvet Revolution. Integral to the narrative is the appearance of a man who was tortured by Jakub's father as well as the complications of Jakub's marriage to Lenka. The ongoing psychological challenge of the long space flight, Jakub's deteriorating relationship with Lenka, a surprising discovery of galactic proportions, and a narrow escape from death will keep readers highly engaged. VERDICT Jakub's coming-of-age story and improbable space flight combine to create an exhilarating concoction of history, social commentary, and irony. Reading like Arthur C. Clarke's 2001 crossed with a Milan Kundera novel, set in a Philip K. Dick universe, with a nod to Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis, it manages to be singularly compelling while still providing mass appeal. Highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, 10/3/16.]--Henry Bankhead, San Rafael P.L., CA

      Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

19. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      Starred review from February 1, 2017
      

      Debut novelist Kalfar offers the near-future tale of the first Czech space mission, designed to explore an enigmatic cosmic dust cloud located somewhere between Venus and Earth. Lone spaceman Jakub Prochazka has always struggled with the burden of being the child of a former party member and operative for the Soviet-backed Communist regime, and this story alternates between the present-day space adventure and Jakub's life before and after the Velvet Revolution. Integral to the narrative is the appearance of a man who was tortured by Jakub's father as well as the complications of Jakub's marriage to Lenka. The ongoing psychological challenge of the long space flight, Jakub's deteriorating relationship with Lenka, a surprising discovery of galactic proportions, and a narrow escape from death will keep readers highly engaged. VERDICT Jakub's coming-of-age story and improbable space flight combine to create an exhilarating concoction of history, social commentary, and irony. Reading like Arthur C. Clarke's 2001 crossed with a Milan Kundera novel, set in a Philip K. Dick universe, with a nod to Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis, it manages to be singularly compelling while still providing mass appeal. Highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, 10/3/16.]--Henry Bankhead, San Rafael P.L., CA

      Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

popularity

1605

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Little, Brown and Company

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