Bianca Bellová‘s astonishing novel, The Lake, was originally published in 2017 as Jezero; it has since been translated into two dozen languages, and Parthian came out with Alex Zucker’s compelling English translation in 2022. From the get-go, it was met with an enthusiastic reception, receiving first the Magnesia Litera in 2016, then the European Prize for Literature in 2017, and the EBRD Literature Prize in 2023. Toby Lichtig, chair of the judges for the EBRD prize, describes it as: “utterly propulsive, immersive and unique, [it] deserves to become a European classic, to be read by many generations to come.”
The story unfolds in a small town on the shores of an extremely polluted lake in an unidentified (but possibly) Central Asian country, of an unidentified (but probably) post-Soviet time. The local population is beset by pollution-related cancers and eczema, and hemmed in by outposts of Russian engineers and soldiers. The protagonist, a boy named Nami, is raised by his grandparents, and he sets off across the lake and into a near-by city to find his mother. There are occasional fantastical elements to the story, and, humming with a fusion of Bellová’s ingenuity and Zucker’s playful and electric English, The Lake sets off all sorts of environmental alarm bells. It brings us such an unusual setting and characters that I was eager to learn more about Bellová’s work. Intrigued by Sal Robinson’s excellent interview with the author on Words Without Borders, I was grateful when Bellová kindly agreed to respond to a few questions.
Ellen Elias-Bursać (EEB): I find that the label “dystopian”—frequently applied to The Lake—feels both apt and inapt. The story plays out on the shores of a polluted, shrinking lake, somewhere on the border between the plausible reality of the world as we know it and a dystopian future. Do you feel that the story you tell is dystopian, or is it more about today’s world?
Bianca Bellová (BB): I am a big fan of readers interpreting my books in any way they wish, and I often do find that they discover contexts and meanings I never intended. And that is perfectly fine—it is the way I believe art should work, as a conversation between the piece and the receiving party that should trigger something in the reader/viewer/listener. Something that is already there, but that the creator was never aware of. So when some say “dystopian,” who am I to argue with it? I never thought about a dystopia when writing it; to me it was a struggle of a boy in a harsh world with the little weapons he had. The lake was a backdrop to it, even if a very important one.
There is a lake called the Aral Sea that is very similar to the lake from my book, and it is in a state so much worse than the fictitious one that it simply beats any utopian fiction writing, hands down.
EEB: I found your situating The Lake in an unnamed, yet distinctly un-Czech place fascinating, especially as the fiction I have been translating from Croatian lately has been so explicitly situated in the past and present of Croatia. Is this exploration of places outside the Czech cultural and geographical context unusual for Czech writers?
BB: I cannot speak for others, but I think the vast majority of Czech contemporary prose takes place on the territory of the Czech Republic and former Czechoslovakia, and historical documentary prose, or autofiction prose, is still very popular. You have other writers like Michael Ajvaz, who embark on Borgesian fantasy trips, but in general I would say it is quite common for Czech fiction writers to stay at home geographically.
EEB: Could you tell us about other novels of yours? What is their time frame and their geographical and cultural context? Who are your protagonists?
BB: I would say there are two types. In the early stages of their writing, my novels were very clearly located both in time and place. They all dealt with geographical and historical facts that I was familiar with—taking place in Czechoslovakia, and later in the Czech Republic in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. There was always a moral challenge that the protagonist had to deal with, most often about how to survive in the face of some regime or establishment, to stay true to their inner moral compass, and the narrative would explore the dilemmas stemming from this conflict. This is the case of my novels Sentimentální román (Sentimental Novel), Mrtvý muž (Dead Man) and Celý den se nic nestane (Nothing Happens All Day).
Then, after Jezero (The Lake), all my other novels started to organically lose their contours. They began to situate themselves in places and at times that aren’t really clarified. There are some hints—you could be reminded of Northern Africa for a while, but then an element of the Middle East comes in, or is it the Balkans? Central Europe? Northern Sea? Is it the twenty-first century? The nineteenth? Or even the sixteenth? As I get older, I’ve become more interested in what we have in common as humans, and I am now trying to find some kind of joint pattern in our existence on Earth, with less interest in the specifics and particularities of the whereabouts. I am trying to figure out exactly what it is particular to the human race. This applies to Jezero, Mona, and Ostrov (The Island).
If there is a motif that is common to all of my books, it is the conflict of the old versus the new, the traditional against the modern. I often place my protagonists in places where they have to decide what to rely on: tradition—which has a warm embrace and is well tried and tested, but can be quite rigid and even stinky in its ways—or modernity, with all its comforts and individual rights, but which can be very lonely and has the ability to pull us into chaos and nothingness. This is my recurring theme, as I feel we are living in the fastest changing society in history, with new rules and challenges popping up every day. When I look back at my childhood, it feels like a thousand years ago.
Oh, and I’ve also written two collections of short stories: Tyhle fragmenty (These Fragments) and Transfer.
EEB: What writing project(s) are you working on now?
BB: I’ve just finished editing my latest novel, entitled Neviditelný muž (The Invisible Man), which should be out in September. It is a story of a woman trying to find answers within her family history, and of a small-town community stained with crime and guilt. The book starts with the sentence: “Never open old family letters because you never know what awaits you there.” So what do you think the protagonist does? Precisely. The traumas have to be dealt with even if it’s painful, otherwise you cannot get on with your life.
Bianca Bellová (1970) was born in Prague, where she lives halfway between the Balkan and British parts of her family. She is a writer, translator, and interpreter. She has published several books of fiction, most notably the novel Jezero (The Lake, 2016) which has won a number of literary awards, including the 2017 EU Prize for Literature and the 2023 EBRD Literature Prize, and its publication rights have been sold to twenty-five countries. Her latest books are Ostrov (The Island, 2022) and Transfer (2023).
Ellen Elias-Bursać has been translating novels, plays, and non-fiction by Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian writers since the 1980s, including writing by David Albahari, Ivana Bodrožić, Daša Drndić, Saša Ilić, Olja Knežević, Igor Štiks, Espi Tomičić, Dubravka Ugrešić, and Karim Zaimović. ALTA’s National Translation Award was given to her translation of Albahari’s novel Götz and Meyer (Gec i Majer; Harvill, 2004) in 2006. After several years of working at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, she wrote the book Translating Evidence and Interpreting Testimony at a War Crimes Tribunal: Working in a Tug of War (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). She was given the Mary Zirin Prize by the Association of Women in Slavic Studies in 2015 for her work as a scholar and translator. She is a past president of the American Literary Translators Association.
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