"A Kind of Black Magic": An Interview with Marek Šindelka

Reading or watching horror is considered fun and entertaining because the evil typically comes in familiar forms – you expect to see a knife-wielding killer wearing a hockey mask, for people to die off in the secluded log cabin, or to be haunted by a variety of identifiable monsters, from vampires to zombies to demons. What makes the work of Czech writer Marek Šindelka both so fascinating and unsettling is his ability to find and depict evil in the most unexpected places, whether in the world of plants and ancient Japanese legend in his debut novel Aberrant, or in the story of an adult woman who passes herself off as a child, revealing a netherworld of child torture and pornography, religious cults and high-level corruption in the graphic novel Svatá Barbora (St. Barbora).

Originally published in 2008, and in an English translation by Nathan Fields in 2017, Chyba (Aberrant) is the genre-bending story of a botany-obsessed smuggler of illegal plants that gets entangled with a problematic past, international organized crime and, as if that weren't enough, an ancient Japanese demon. Just as singular as the novel itself are its unique beginnings. 

"The first thing I wrote in this book was a haiku," Šindelka says. "I started as a poet and I initially wanted to continue. I started this book with a couple of poems. It was really a seed of the novel and it somehow evolved and started to grow. It was a very strange process."

The finished novel remains interspersed with poems that carry on the often subconscious and hallucinatory aspects of the story. Šindelka, who had previously published a book of poetry, refers to the transition of Aberrant to prose as both a tabula rasa for him as well as an adventure. "I wasn't very skillful in prose back then so it was dreamlike for me, an observation of how prose texts actually work. I realized after a couple of months, maybe years – because it took me more than three years to finish the book – and I realized it was like a growing flower or something like that, because it started with this seed and grew, produced some branches and roots, and so on. In the end, I was almost terrified of this structure of the book because there was some tendency in it that forced it to grow, as if on its own."

Even after the novel's initial publication in 2008, this growth has shown no sign of stopping. Three years later he published a graphic novel version of the book he collaborated on with Vojtěch Mašek and artists Matěj Lipavský and Pure Beauty. Šindelka's compulsion to return to Aberrant's subject and themes has even brought him back to the novel for another pass. He says the newer version highlights the ecological aspects of the novel and their more apocalyptic elements. "I did this second version of the novel and now I feel it's still not complete. It's like a natural process. I think this form suits it well because it's about plants, nature. It's about vital processes in the human body. So for me this form is great."

Weighing out his dissatisfaction and the productivity that has arisen from it, Šindelka takes a measured view. "Even after it was over there was somehow a need to continue the story. It hasn't happened with other works. With other texts, I feel they're finished. In this case, it's like a never-ending story. I've never been satisfied with the novel. But some people like it and I'm just the producer of the novel, so I can afford to hate it."

Sensibility and senses

Considering he works as a screenwriter and has already seen Aberrant go from novel to graphic novel, it would be only natural to consider adapting the book to the big screen, yet it turns out the attempts to do so have provided its author with valuable insight into his own work:

"There have been a couple of attempts to make a film out of it but they've failed, unfortunately. I think there's something that's not easy to translate. It seems it's full of images and we did the graphic novel because of that too. And many people told me to do a film from the book because it's so visual. But when we were working on the graphic novel I realized that all those images, or not all but many of them, were based on different senses."

In trying to develop an adaptation there was one sense, in particular, that was a significant part of the novel but clearly could never come across on film. "The book is based on smells. This is a key sense. You can smell things. It is full of fragrances. A friend of mine told me 'The book stinks,' and I took it as a compliment. It amazes me that literature is capable of doing that. You can use the sensual apparatus of the human body. You can force people to see things, to smell things, to touch things, to taste things, and when you find the proper language, the proper combination of words then it can be a kind of black magic. You can create something palpable and present."

Internal immigration

A disturbingly similar effect can be found in Šindelka's novel Únava materiálu (Material Fatigue, 2016), though both the senses activated and the subject matter they are put towards are worlds away from those of Aberrant. The novel has been translated into Dutch, Arabic and Hungarian among other languages but has yet to come out in English. What unites the two works is the visceral horror they provoke, in this case relating to the experience of illegal immigration into Europe:

"My aim was to write it as close as possible to the subject, to really be in another person's skin, to feel their heartbeat, to feel their breath, and so on. I think that's one of the main forces of literature, that you can go inside. Other arts like film are on the surface. You're never able to reach the inner world, and even literally the innards."

By inside though, Šindelka isn't just referring to the inner thoughts and feelings of his refugee characters on the perilous journey to Europe, which would be fairly conventional. Instead, he does something far more uncomfortable:

"In Material Fatigue I have a chapter about organs in the body because it takes place in complete darkness and the character is pushed into a small space in a trunk of a car near the engine. This is a way to smuggle people into Europe. And it's all about the movements of his inner organs, about his inability to breathe because it's very claustrophobic."

He admits that some readers told him they had to stop reading because of the claustrophobia of the scene. For him it isn't about making readers suffer but bearing witness to the brutal reality of the immigrant experience. "I believe literature is powerful enough to take you to the edge of what is bearable, which is great when you work with it. Of course, there's always the danger of abusing this."

Once the novel's protagonist endures the journey he has to contend not only with terrible feelings of alienation in Europe but with being separated from his brother and figure out how to find him.

Reality horror show

Real-life horror gave Šindelka the material for his 2018 graphic novel collaboration with Vojtěch Mašek and artist Marek Pokorný, Svatá Barbora (St. Barbora). If not a true-crime story it's a story based on a bizarre but actual case and the multitude of conspiracy theories it gave rise to. In the city of Tromso in the North of Norway, a police raid finds a young boy alone in a hotel room. In a small Czech town, a man's video baby monitor accidentally picks up images of a young girl from the house next door tied up, malnourished. Her name is revealed to be Anička, and what unites her with the boy later found in Norway is that they are the same person, that neither of them existed, and that their real identity is that of an adult woman named Barbora Š. What is behind her story involves a religious sect dating back a century, the shadowy figure of Barbora's father who was reportedly involved in crimes ranging from child pornography to weapons dealing. French and Spanish translations of the graphic novel have appeared in 2020 but aside from the book's opening appearing in Words Without Borders, it has yet to find an English-language publisher. 

What was terrible, tragic and a tangled mess in real life offered a wealth of opportunity for writing about it, Šindelka says: "The type of fear that was there was unique. For me, it was especially interesting because there were some very unusual problems with identity, with the body, with how transient it can be, with how easily an identity can be passed on to somebody else or something else like that. In the reality, we believe in it's actually very simple, to transfer your life somewhere else. Or finish your life in an official way and start again."

Initially, Šindelka and Mašek resembled the journalist character to a degree in that they hoped to figure out this largely unsolved case. "Very soon we realized that it was pathetic and impossible," Šindelka says. It wasn't only because the answers were out of reach but because they realized their own obsessiveness resembled that of the country's when the case broke in 2007 and Czech people were glued to their TV screens and this unbelievable story was a topic of everyday conversation.

"So we changed the direction completely and decided to write something about ourselves, about this obsession with stories like this. Because what was it? Why were we so fascinated with this case? Why do we need those stories full of blood and suffering and tortured children and more and more and more? So in a way, it was our self-analysis and that's why we decided that our protagonist would be a journalist. She has this longing for great stories, this search for the truth, this obsession with all those terrible things - that's media. She's, in a way, our alter-ego in the graphic novel."

Now they are working on a TV series based on the graphic novel which will be a documentary combined with animation. So many questions and unexplored facets of the case remain yet as to whether there will ever be answers, let alone justice, Šindelka is skeptical:

"I don't believe anyone will solve it. It's locked and what's so strange is that the main protagonists not only were never sentenced, they never even appeared in court. It's a mystery. Some people technically know what's behind it but for the police, for normal people, for journalists, it's inaccessible and impenetrable because it's guarded. This religious group, which is most likely still active, won't allow anyone in. It's that simple."

Interviewed by Michael Stein