Jaroslav Rudiš: I think that literature is not a lost cause

Erika Zlamalová: One of the topics of discussion at this year's festival will be comics. You work in this genre along with Jaromír 99. How did this collaboration start and who is the "father" of Alois Nebel?

Jaroslav Rudiš: Alois Nebel is our shared child and we can't really say who is the father or mother. He was born on a slightly drunken and highly creative evening in one spit-covered pub in Žižkov with trains rumbling by. Long before that we'd talked about the lack of a graphic novel in the Czech Republic that dealt with serious topics. And so Alois Nebel was born, the solitary dispatcher from a small station in the Jeseník Mountains, where the whole last century rides through with all its traumas. They're following Nebel and he has to come to terms with them. And also to finally find someone to love him.

EZ: Where do you get your inspiration for the comic-book stories of Alois Nebel?

JR: From history, both the larger one and the small, private one. My grandfather was a switchman at a little station in the Sudetes and was named Alois. My uncle worked for a long time as a dispatcher in the border region too. And he told me about it. And then Jaromír, he thought back to his youth in Jeseník and contributed a lot of stories, and also for example the character of the silent Pole Němý, who really did show up one day at a train stop there, didn't speak and then they stuck him in the madhouse, where it turned out two years later that he was a murderer. We turned him into the avenger of all the evil that went through that wild border region.

EZ: How is work going on the film version of Alois Nebel? Are you planning to distribute the movie abroad?

JR: The director Tomáš Luňák is shooting the film and the company Negativ is producing it. It will take two years to make because we picked fairly demanding rotoscoping technology. Alois Nebel is played by Miroslav Krobot and seeing as how there are co-producers from Germany and Slovakia taking part financially, it will evidently be seen abroad as well. The rights for sales abroad were bought by the German company Match Factory, which for example represents the highly successful animated film Waltz with Bashir.

EZ: How does Alois Nebel transfer to the big screen? The drawings really determine the atmosphere with him. Or are the words and the message they carry more important?

JR: That's the reason we went with rotoscoping. The shot material is traced over and the result will be very close to a comic. It will be a black-and-white live action and at the same time animated feature.

EZ: Did you ever think about filming Heaven Under Berlin?

JR: A number of filmmakers were interested in Heaven Under Berlin, but nothing ever came of it. It's not easy to turn the wordy and undramatic story into a screenplay.

EZ: You often take part in author readings here, but also especially in Germany. How is the feedback of the listeners beneficial for you?

JR: I really enjoy live readings; I like the mutual interaction, where you see that your text really works. You can open it up. In Germany lots of people come to readings too, they're very popular. And German authors also generally know how to read from their books much better than Czech ones.

EZ: How is the German public different than the Czech public?

JR: In Germany people go out to see literature. I think Czech readers are still learning to do that. But it's changing. When my friend, poet and photographer Igor Malijevský, and I started doing our literary cabarets in Prague, 50 people came. Now there's twice as many and the small hall at Divadlo Archa is sold out several weeks in advance. That pleases us immensely.

EZ: Your work is closely connected with Berlin. You lived and studied there for a time. Is that multicultural city better suited for writers?

JR: In short it's very inspiring. It's not an especially pretty city, but it has an overwhelming energy and an exciting cultural scene. Compared to Berlin Prague is a somewhat sleepy town.

EZ: Milan Kundera claims in his essays that the "novelist is born from the ruins of his lyrical world". Did poems mark the start of your literary endeavours as well?

JR: Yes, unfortunately. And I hope that no one ever finds my first poems. I even wrote a collection that I presented to a girl at my high school. I loved her a lot. But it didn't help. I hope she lost it.

EZ: And where in your life was the desire to write born?

JR: It just came. For a long time I dreamed of playing in a rock band, I even tried to start one, but it never really worked out. But it worked for me to write about music. And I quite liked to read. Then when I found myself in Berlin, I was all of the sudden in a kind of vacuum, without friends, alone. And all at once I started writing and Heaven Under Berlin just tumbled out of me, a novel from the Berlin underground.

EZ: One can really feel the Czech temperament and stereotype in the Alois Nebel stories. The Prague Writers' Festival is an attempt to set up a confrontation of opinions between various cultures and traditions. Do you think Czechs are capable of that kind of confrontation? Or rather, do you think they're able to perceive themselves as a part of the world and attempt to look at themselves in that light?

JR: I  think that kind of confrontation isn't necessary, but completely natural. And Czechs are as open to it as other Europeans – sometimes we like to talk about the traumas and blunders of other nations more than our own.

EZ: Franz Kafka said that art is an axe that breaks the frozen sea inside us. Do you think that literature in this day and age still has power, the kind of power to break down the walls that people and nations build between them?

JR: The role of literature is constantly changing – fifty years ago people may have read more than today, but also not as many books came out. I think that literature is not a lost cause. The drive to read stories will always be here and walls don't necessarily need to fall. Books can also simply lighten up a train ride. And maybe stories from novels will shift to comics. Why not.