The sheer normality of the railway here in Europe – unlike in the US, where train travel is considered romantic if not obsolete – can sometimes obscure its literary potential. Not only is the railway a means of moving from A to B, it is also a location of its own, both in the platforms, restaurants, and terrible bookstores that make up most train stations and in the carriages themselves, whether these are reserved for companions or shared with strangers (or, on the ICE, over-loud German business bros debating das Brand Management).
To ride a train is to be immersed in the present; it may also be a nod to the climate-conscious future. But it also means encountering the past, either consciously or subconsciously, as one follows tracks and traditions established over centuries of European train travel. What’s more, a train’s sequence of carriages literalises the very essence of narrative storytelling: first comes one thing, and then comes the next thing, and then comes the next thing.
To ride a train is to be immersed in the present
Little wonder, then, that trains provide such constant literary inspiration – particularly to authors in Central Europe, a region deeply marked by the tension between local identity, cosmopolitan pasts and supranational conquest. One could map a jagged train line from Gallicia’s Joseph Roth via Poland’s Sten Nadolny, Czechia’s Bohumil Hrabal, Switzerland’s Peter Weber and up to the Irish Berliner John Holten – a contemporary rail-thinker whose novel The Trains of Europe is out now with Broken Dimanche Press.
One particularly fascinating stop on the rail-lit odyssey is Helen Oyeyemi. In 2021, this UK-born Prague resident – whose postmodern fictions gleefully cross borders of nationality and identity – published Peaces, a wild-mongoose-led romp set on a mysterious train journey. As Oyeyemi’s shapeshifting vision takes hold, the consequential arrangements of carriages and stations give way to something far wilder. Stories and identities go into curious flux, while the losers of history return to vengefully upturn the present.
Perhaps our moment’s most exciting train writer is Jaroslav Rudiš, a prolific Czech-German author whose magisterial novel Winterberg’s Last Journey is out now in Kris Best’s fine English translation. Rudiš, a lifelong train nut, grew up dreaming of a career in the railways but had to give up on account of his eyesight – sad for him, but a major boon for readers who can enjoy his witty, accessible, rock‘n’roll-inflected books, almost all of which involve trains. (His Der Himmel unter Berlin is chiefly set in our city’s U-Bahn.)
Winterberg’s Last Journey is a brilliant tragicomic novel, action-packed and immensely European. Its narrator, a melancholy young Czech Berliner working in elder care, gets assigned to an eccentric 99-year-old named Winterberg – who then whisks him off on a wild ride across Central Europe. Here, as throughout Rudiš’s work, the railway stands for the deep ties between the region’s linguistic and national communities. It tangibly undermines, too, the historical fantasies being propagated by the region’s modern-day xenophobes and eurosceptics.
Rudiš also authored the bestselling nonfiction book Gebrauchsanweisung fürs Zugreisen, a very personal exploration of Europe’s railways that also functions as a literary-political train history and a surprisingly useful guide for travellers – a peerless companion for summer rail adventuring. One hopes it comes out in English very soon.
