As this is the literary edition I have been thinking about books which link the reader to a place. My long term obsession with New York is a result of the fact that so many of the fictional characters I have fallen in love with and carry with me walked the streets of Brooklyn, Harlem and Manhattan, in slushy winter snow and fierce sunshine. Amongst these number Chaim Potok, whose books about Jewish life in Brooklyn make me feel New York as a faraway home, inhabited by people whose lives resonate so strongly with my own experience.
When I lived in Edinburgh I loved to read Alexander McCall Smith’s Scotland Street series. The characters inhabited the exact same world as I did. One of them lived in the next street down (Marchmont Road) and regularly went for coffee at The Elephant House. The frames of reference were the same; Dundee and the cold hard North, weekend trips to the Islands, tough and matey Glasgow and poncy but elegant Edinburgh. McCall Smith made the city a character in itself as well as a home for various people and their lives.
I venture to guess that no work of fiction has yet been set in České Budějovice. I, personally, would be up for the challenge but only if you all promise to buy it. In preparation for this eventuality I have put together a list of elements that would make my Budějovice opus sum up the town that I know.
What kind of world would my Budějovice characters inhabit? Like McCall Smith’s characters, they would spend a lot of time in coffee shops, quietly ruminating. There is no revolution in the air in Široko or Sorte Øyne, but a very tangible contentment, a sense of rich time oozing by. Datel, late night on a weekend when nobody wants to go home, feels like a private party, a living room. (That goes for the former and much missed Living Room too of course).
In times of depression and darkness the empty Budějovice weekend would hang heavily on these characters. They would wander the deserted square and side streets and feel alone in the world, abandoned. In the summer months, when there aren’t enough weekends to hold all the festivals and they spill out into all the other days of the week, the characters would feel elated, part of things again, pampered and over provided for in this tiny city. There would be much description of long long nights out by the river, drinking beer and avoiding bikes alongside Staré Časy and Železná Panna, when all the lost friends of winter reappear.
To be honest, the book would probably be very much the tale of people recuperating from life or coming home to think it over before heading out again, because Budějovice is often a jumping point to other places. Whether that be to Prague or Šumava at the weekends or back to whole lives lived further afield. But because it is a base camp does not mean it has no soul.
In fact that would be one of the philosophical undercurrents of the work (to make it more highbrow). Characters would spend long evenings discussing whether the city in fact has a soul, what makes soul anyhow, why even the smallest Czech village seems to have more soul than this capital of the region. There would also be much hand-wringing over the good for nothing students. But, unlike in most places, where students are disliked for noise, drunkenness and stealing cones to put on statues, here the characters would complain about their inactivity.
“They don’t go anywhere”, the adult characters would lament over their flat whites in Široko, “you only ever meet them on the No.3 heading home to Mum for the weekend. When I was a student in Brno…….” And so on. The students themselves would be background characters, rarely glimpsed in crowd scenes, happily getting on with their kolej based lives and largely unaware of how miserably they are failing at being students.
Chaim Potok’s books on New York face dark themes squarely, in daily struggles with conflict, violence and hatred. A book set in Budějovice would be much more similar to the work of McCall Smith, in which darkness arises only occasionally, unexpectedly, in the midst of gentle, happy normal life. A book set in Budějovice could hint at the town’s forgotten German residents, who used to have their winter balls at the German House (Slavie). Or the synagogue which was blown up in 1942, now commemorated by a car park. Discord would be a very background detail, an anti-Islam poster on a student noticeboard, or rumours about new troubles on Máj. This is not a place where much happens, not even the bad, but it nevertheless reflects the outside world, even if only weakly, palely. It wouldn’t be a very heavy book, let’s face it, more a whimsical reflection on normal life played out in happy small town days
At least one main character would have to be one of us awkward and somewhat dissatisfied foreigners, a few steps from being fully integrated citizens, with clinging ties to other lands and other attitudes. The foreigners in the book would always be disappearing “home” or “away”; their function would be to cast a different angle on the Czech life of the town. In their role of roaming doubter, they would be joined by Czechs who have lived abroad and also inhabit a more international mindset. These returnee Czechs would always be caught between defending their homeland against outsiders who misunderstand it and rhapsodising about their years away in Valencia or London. Scenes involving foreigners and returnees would take place overwhelmingly in Singer, late night at the weekends.
So, in conclusion, the Budějovice book would be much more similar to McCall Smith than to Potok. It would be about normal people in a peaceful place, whose dramas are the demands of regular life, existence and relationships. But it would be similar to Potok’s tales of Brooklyn Jews in that, to people who haven’t lived here, these elements do make up a specific format, a way of life that is very unique in its own way, with tensions and currents that exist nowhere else in the world.
Natalie Czaban 
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