Librarian/Curator for Slavic, Eastern European and Eurasian Studies
Alena Aissing
Contact:
A1540 Charles E. Young Research Library
Box 951575
Los Angeles, CA 90095
Box 951575
Los Angeles, CA 90095
310-206-0324
Background
Writing a Way out of Communism
April 19, 2023, 5:30–7:30 pm PDT
Leading Czech novelist Martin Vopěnka reflected on how growing up in communist Europe, writers found their voices. What can we learn from their fictional worlds as we face our own troubled times? As he launched his new novel, My Brother, the Messiah Martin Vopěnka led us into the mindset of current Slavic writing. This event was hosted by the UCLA Library in partnership with the UCLA Center for European and Russian Studies, the UCLA Department of Slavic, East European & Eurasian Languages & Cultures, and the Consulate General of the Czech Republic in Los Angeles.
Organized by Alena Aissing (Librarian/Curator for the Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies at UCLA Library) and Igor Plishchiko, Ph.D. (Professor and Chair of the UCLA Department of Slavic, East European and Eurasian Languages and Cultures)
Speaker
The Jewish-Czech author Martin Vopěnka is one of the leading voices in world literature, "reminiscent of both Kafka and Kundera" (Choice). Martin’s 1989 debut Kameny z hor (Rocks from the Mountains) recorded memories and emotions from a journey across the Romanian Carpathians. His novels and travel writing have continued to deliver a deep and intense exploration of our modern world. In 2016 his Nová Planeta (New Planet) won the country’s premier Golden Ribbon Award. Martin heads the Association of Czech Booksellers and Publishers and owns Práh publishing house.
Moderator
Martin Goodman’s debut novel On Bended Knees, shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award, heralded a major theme of his writing: the aftermath of wars. His nonfiction picked up the theme when his biography of the scientist who worked to counter WW1 gas attacks, Suffer & Survive, won First Prize, Basis of Medicine in the BMA Book Awards. In Client Earth, which won the Jury’s Choice Business Book of the Year Award 2018, and the Green Book Award from Santa Monica Libraries, he told the story of ecolawyers who battle to rescue the planet from human destruction. He is an Emeritus Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Hull.
Selected Works
My Brother the Messiah by ISBN: 1909954470Date: 4/04/2023It's 2096. Scientists work to protect a baking planet. What a drought-stricken Europe needs is rain. What it gets is a messiah. Eli is born in a suburb of Prague. A rainstorm heralds the birth. Perhaps this messiah is for real. Eli's father abandons the family to become the dictator's right-hand man. Eli's elder brother Marek guides Eli through his short and powerful life. Can tales of a messiah be enough to heal a ravaged planet in which few babies are born? Marek works with the zeal of a prophet. Aged 72, he's still going strong. A new follower joins Marek's community, young Natalia. She awakens the old man to the joys of the body. But what's the worth of a human love when the environment is collapsing? Marek sets out to find his answer. My Brother the Messiah is a story about daring to seed the future of our planet.
Ballad of Descent by ISBN: 0810112523Date: 7/19/1995Martin and Tomas leave Prague on Christmas Day for "that other country." Although their destination is the mountains, their departure has been initiated by a search for their own identity--people in their country have become alike, losing their individuality and becoming products of a totalitarian regime. The pair become the guests of a high school teacher, but Martin falls in love with the teacher's daughter only to lose her in a police suppression, and the Other Country is revealed as a merciless machine of oppression that throws its people into despair.
The Fifth Dimension by ISBN: 9781909954083Date: 10/01/2016A contemporary classic from the Czech Republic. To support his family, a man submits himself to a solo science experiment in the High Andes. This is a cosmic adventure story of big ideas and murder. Your business is dead. It seems like a deal: leave your family behind in Prague for a year, isolate yourself in a research station in the Andes, and come home with a fortune. With a treatise on black holes for company, Jakob settles in at altitude. The air is thin. Strangers pass by on dangerous pilgrimage while his young wife and kids take life in his mind. In mountain starkness, the big questions take shape: like what happens to love inside a black hole?
The Back of Beyond by ISBN: 1951508017Date: 7/20/2021Martin Vopěnka's novel, The Back of Beyond--Travels with Benjamin, is the story of a middle-aged man, who--despite his professional success and affluence--lacks fulfillment. After the tragic death of his wife, he is left alone with his eight-year-old son and quickly realizes that if he wants to succeed in the role of single parent that has suddenly been thrust upon him, he has to change fundamentally. So, he takes his son and sets out on a journey to what he dubs the Back of Beyond. Without telling anyone of their plans--in fact, without any plans to speak of--father and son travel from city to city, from country to country, assembling a travelogue that includes not only depictions of exotic places and colorful encounters, but also an inner journey, deep into the human experience and the complexities of living in a post-communist world. With its unique blend of sensitive and suggestive language, The Back of Beyond - Travels with Benjamin is a stylistic gem, rendered in seamless translation and appearing here for the first time in English.
On Bended Knees by Call Number: 1992ISBN: 9781909954502Tomas is taught by English war veterans. He walks the ruins of Coventry with his Gran, the city still rebuilding from the blitz. But his mother is German, and as he nears adulthood Tomas finds himself heading to Berlin. He’s taken in by his enigmatic uncle, a blind, disgraced Nazi soldier. Arm in arm, they explore a drastically changing Berlin, leading one another to places anew. Tomas finds more family out in Dresden, a city decimated by Allied firebombs. What might a young man make of this shattered legacy? What might we inherit from the wars of our elders, and how might we move on?
Suffer and survive : gas attacks, miners' canaries, spacesuits, and the bends : the extreme life of Dr. J.S. Haldane by ISBN: 0743285972Date: 8/04/2008John Scott Haldane (1860-1936) was one of the greatest and most colourful of British scientists, acknowledged as the leading physiologist of the Victorian era. The most successful serial self-experimenter in the history of science, Haldane crawled through the carnage of underground explosions, locked himself in sealed chambers, breathed in lethal cocktails of gases, sampled his own blood, burned and healed his own flesh, and experimented on his own children in an obsessive push to understand the nature of human respiration. What is expired air? How can you make coal mines safer? What does carbon monoxide do to people? These are just some of the vital questions to which Haldane provided the answers, saving thousands of lives in the process. He also designed the first space-suit and invented the gas-mask, among many other innovations and contributions we still benefit from today. Entertaining and enlightening in equal measure, Martin Goodman's lively and revealing biography casts new light on one of the greatest eccentrics of British scientific and intellectual life.
Client Earth by ISBN: 1911344080Date: 5/11/2017"Who will stop the planet from committing ecological suicide? The UN? Governments? Activists? Corporations? Engineers? Scientists? Whoever, environmental laws need to be enforceable and enforced. Step forward a fresh breed of passionately purposeful environmental lawyers. They provide new rules to legislatures, see that they are enforced, and keep us informed. They tackle big business to ensure money flows into cultural change, because money is the grammar of business just as science is the grammar of nature. At the head of this new legal army stands James Thornton, who takes governments to court, and wins. And his client is the Earth. With Client Earth, we travel from Poland to Ghana, from Alaska to China, to see how citizens can use public interest law to protect their planet. Foundations and philanthropists support the law group ClientEarth because they see, plainly and brightly, that the law is a force all parties recognize. Lawyers who take the Earth as their client are exceptional and inspirational. They give us back our hope."
On Sacred Mountains by ISBN: 9781872883588Date: 5/01/2002Mountains, though they might seem to be merely big bits of rock decorated with snow and trees, are in fact “great teachers”. Nipping up summits the world over, Goodman finally finds one that talks. Yes: Guadaloupe Peak, Texas, is a speaking mountain. It says to him: “All you need is love.” (Why can’t mountains like the Beatles, too?) Later on, Goodman begins “to suspect, and also to fear, that I was to be a prophet of a new world order”. Indeed. Either an important spiritual document, or an admonitory example of the effects of oxygen deprivation. – The Guardian. Decide for yourself. The book stems from years spent travelling to the sacred mountains of the world.
I Was Carlos Castaneda by ISBN: 0609807633Date: 4/24/2001Carlos Castaneda comes back from the dead in a true-life spiritual adventure story set in the French Pyrenees, Machu Picchu, the Peruvian Amazon, and the American Southwest.
Four months after his death, the world-renowned writer, anthropologist, and mystic Carlos Castaneda turns up in the French Pyrenees. He meets with writer Martin Goodman. His purpose? To lead Martin beyond the fear of death and the confusions of mortality, and to offer a clearer understanding of the ultimate wisdom -- the wisdom to live the rest of our days in full and conscious harmony with the living earth.
Ectopia by ISBN: 0956336450Date: 6/20/2013A dystopian novel set around London's disused Heathrow Airport.For sixteen years the Earth has baked and no girls have been born. Karen's the last girl. Steven's her gay twin. Dad turns their home into a fortress as women take their chance to rule the world. Their eyes are on Steven. Perhaps, with a little medical interference, he could be the saviour of the world. The boys of teensquad run the streets, insects clog the skies, the last chance to save the world is handed to a council of women, and scientists are cooking up a brand new Eden.
