Varicoloured Strata

Ivan Landsmann was granted a permit for a one-year stay in Holland in the mid-1980s. For several weeks, he was trying fruitlessly to find his fellow countrymen, sleeping in parks and fields. Eventually he obtained Jaroslav Hutka’s address in Rotterdam: “I didn’t know anything about Jaroslav Hutka. I had some money, about twelve hundred dollars, that I had earned with my brother in Canada. I found a hotel to stay at, and when I ran out of money I had to sleep in parks, in crops and so on. I would just go and ring Hutka’s doorbell. It took me almost two months to catch him at home.” Ivan Landsmann and Jaroslav Hutka became lifelong friends. When they first met, Landsmann had experienced many unpleasant things and was depressed. Hutka encouraged his friend: “He told me: ‘Look, Ivan, writing is the best cure for this. Write; write a diary, it will help you.’ So I started writing a diary and then gave it to Hutka to read. He said: ‘That’s not a diary – that’s a book right there. Keep on writing.’ So I started writing the Varicoloured Strata. I asked Jarek if I should write about mines and he goes: ‘Sure, do it.’ That’s what Varicoloured Strata came to be.” Hutka tried to arrange for the publication of Landsmann’s first novel with Josef Škvorecký’s 69 Publishers in Canada. It did not happen, but even so Škvorecký helped Landsmann indirectly to obtain a permanent residence permit and citizenship in Holland. The novel Varicoloured Strata was published by TORST in 1999 and won the Book of the Year award from the readers of Lidové noviny. Ivan Landsmann lived in Rotterdam on welfare for a long time; he learned the language slowly and with difficulties.