Authors Electric

As a child, staring at an old atlas, Czechoslovakia was a country that somehow fascinated. The spelling of the country’s name, the pronunciation, the shape of it on the map. I was twenty-four by the time I saw the place for myself, arriving there three years after the Velvet Revolution of 1989, so no visa necessary, the country was open now to European travellers. Prague. That’s where I first ran out of money for food, and had to eat on alternate days, lying on public benches to conserve calories, nose bleeding. Getting kicked awake in the mornings by railway station guards in pale green uniforms with wooden-handled revolvers in their waistbands. I’d first been introduced to the novels of Milan Kundera four years earlier, by a guy I met who had written a book on film while he had been unemployed for three years. Perhaps the connection between this person and Kundera was that Kundera had been a film lecturer at one point, or, more correctly, a lecturer on world litera...