Authors

Myka Tucker-Abramson¹;  ¹ University of Warwick, UK

Discussion

From Iva Pekárková's Truck Stop Rainbows, to Walter Kempowski's Marrow and Bone, Chris Kraus' Torpor, Zachary Karabashliev's 18% Gray, and Ingo Schulze's Adam and Evelyn, a remarkably diverse range of authors on both sides of the Iron Curtain have turned to the “road novel” to narrate the collapse of the socialist world. This paper asks why and what work these road novels do. Drawing on Ignacio Sanchez Prado’s argument that Mexican road films both “narrativize the failure of personal development and national modernization,” I argue that post-socialist road novels similarly reflect a failed desire for development and modernization, while also encoding the violent, vertiginous, and often catastrophic experience of being incorporated into the capitalist world-system. To illustrate this claim, I turn to Pekárková’s Truck Stop Rainbow (1989). I argue that while the novel begins as an anti-Soviet countercultural novel that explicitly takes up the American genre and its embedded conceptions of freedom to level a critique of the bureaucratic drudgery, ecological destruction, and violence of everyday life in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, it transmogrifies into a more ambivalent account of transition – one that emplots the ČSSR’s role as a central throughfare for natural gas, and oil and its transformation into a semi-peripheral exporter of raw or partially processed materials alongside its protagonist’s own transformation into a source cheap, racialised sexual labour.