Interview: Czech Author Jáchym Topol Talks With Translator Alex Zucker

On journalism, paying the bills, genocide, the Holocaust, Belarus, and growing up under communism — not in that order

Thanks to Daniel Medin, of the Center for Writers and Translators, and to Scott Esposito, editor of the Quarterly Conversation, Jáchym and I were given plenty of space to explore some of the longer-running themes in his writing.

The Jáchym Topol Interview

Jáchym Topol, Tel Aviv, February 2013
Photo: Pierre Pe'er Friedmann

Today Marks U.S. Release of Jáchym Topol’s The Devil’s Workshop

As of today, Alex Zucker’s translation of Jáchym Topol’s The Devil’s Workshop (Portobello Books), winner of the 2013 English PEN Award for Writing in Translation, is available in the United States. Order a copy from your local bookstore now, via IndieBound.

Jáchym Topol, 2007. Photo: Karel Cudlín.

Here are the most important reviews of the book so far, since its release June 6 in the UK:

• “The Irresistible Heart of Darkness: Jáchym Topol and the Devil to Pay,” The Quarterly Conversation, by Madeleine La Rue. A review of all of Topol’s novels published in English so far: The Devil’s Workshop (2013), Gargling With Tar (2010), and City Sister Silver (2000). (His novella A Trip to the Train Station is also available in English, in a 2011 reissue.) Favorite quote: “[Topol’s] restlessness lends speed and urgency to the surface of his writing. His texts are a series of flashes before a vague storm; his characters spend their lives reeling from their thrownness in the world.”
• “‘Horrible, repelling, unusual, and very very good’ – The Devil’s Workshop by Jáchym Topol,” Bookmunch, by Lucy Chatburn. Favorite quote: It’s in the title.
• “The Devil’s Workshop by Jáchym Topol – review,” The Guardian, by Jane Housham. Favorite quote: “. . . the humour turns so treacly black it almost chokes you.”

We’re eager to read what U.S. reviewers have to say.

Genocide, History, Fame: Jáchym Topol Has a Lot on His Mind

"Set in the Terezín ghetto and in Belarus, [The Devil's Workshop] continues Topol’s practice of re-examining history through the surrealist-tinted lens of his imagination. The subject of [his latest novel] is Topol’s darkest yet: the Belarusian genocide, propagated by the Nazis as part of Generalplan Ost, the ethnic cleansing of Eastern Europe which led to the death of approximately 4 million men, women and children, about half the population of Belarus. 'Belarus shocked me. I went there because one of my books was published there, and I learned what many people still do not realize: that the country is an unhappy place where the machinery of mass murder was tested,' he said."

—"Author is hemmed in by history," The Prague Post, Oct. 13, 2010

Cover of Chladnou zemí (2009), now
available in English as The Devil's Workshop.