Jan Novak's biographical novel of the Masin brothers named 'book of the year'
The Czech-born author Jan Novak has won the coveted Magnesia Litera "book of the year" award for his biographical novel about two brothers who fled communist Czechoslovakia in the early 1950s. Ctirad and Josef Masin - sons of a Czech anti-Nazi resistance hero - were part of an anti-communist group of men who shot several policemen dead and killed two StB secret police officers during earlier robberies of arms stores, before escaping to the West. The Masin brothers - who still live in self-imposed exile in the United States - are viewed as killers by some and heroes by others. Jan Novak's 800-page book - which he wrote in English and began as a screenplay- tells their true story.
"I was approached and I was offered the possibility to make the film - if it was done in English. And I declined it, because I think there's a huge difference... I don't think an American grabs a gun the same way a Czech grabs a gun, you know. I'm afraid that if the movie was shot as an American film it would just be a 'cops and robbers' film and it would lose all the moral and political complexity which is dear to me."
"The story is, I think, the greatest story of the Cold War... You know, the Masin brothers were demonised by the communist propaganda for forty years... and I think the Czech public at large has no idea about what really happened. They've only heard and they have even seen on TV one fictionalised account of what they did which is completely inaccurate, so they have been brainwashed basically and they don't really know the facts of the case and I am hoping that the book - and, hopefully, the movie - will help to put things into the right context."
The Czech translation of Jan Novak's book "So Far So Good" took tops honours at the Magensia Litera awards, which were announced on Monday. The editor Jan Rezac won a lifetime achievement award for his publishing houses' translations of world literature. The jury passed over Czech author Michael Wievegh, who nonetheless won the readers' write-in award.
