Jaroslav Rudiš - Where the Dead Speak – Reading and Discussion
The readings by Czech author Jaroslav Rudiš have achieved true cult status. His new novel takes us on a hilarious and fast-paced road trip across Central Europe. Lorenzo, Caspar, and Miss Detroit are on the road in an old Saab. Three friends, somewhere between middle age and world-weariness. In the trunk: the bones of a Nazi criminal, which they stole from a Berlin cemetery to beat the looting “Reich Citizens” to it. What begins as an absurd mission turns into a road trip through cemeteries and into the past. While Lorenzo devours books and tries to write a doctoral dissertation on dead European poets, Miss Detroit, behind the wheel, dreams of becoming a cemetery botanist and talking to the dead through the flowers. And the nearly blind Caspar thinks of his father in Bohemian Paradise, whose deceased friends still haunt his local bar. With every kilometer they drive, the three grow closer to one another and hear the voices of the dead more clearly from grave to grave: What do they talk about when you listen to them? And whose voices are best left unheard?
The readings by Czech author Jaroslav Rudiš have achieved true cult status. His new novel takes us on a hilarious and fast-paced road trip across Central Europe. Lorenzo, Caspar, and Miss Detroit are on the road in an old Saab. Three friends, somewhere between middle age and world-weariness. In the trunk: the bones of a Nazi criminal, which they stole from a Berlin cemetery to beat the looting “Reich Citizens” to it. What begins as an absurd mission turns into a road trip through cemeteries and into the past. While Lorenzo devours books and tries to write a doctoral dissertation on dead European poets, Miss Detroit, behind the wheel, dreams of becoming a cemetery botanist and talking to the dead through the flowers. And the nearly blind Caspar thinks of his father in Bohemian Paradise, whose deceased friends still haunt his local bar. With every kilometer they drive, the three grow closer to one another and hear the voices of the dead more clearly from grave to grave: What do they talk about when you listen to them? And whose voices are best left unheard?
