The Other City (Eastern European Literature) (Czech Literature Series) [Paperback]

Michal Ajvaz (Author), Gerald Turner (Translator)

Book Description

Series: Czech Literature Series | Publication Date: June 11, 2009

In this strange and lovely hymn to Prague, Michal Ajvaz repopulates the city of Kafka with ghosts, eccentrics, talking animals, and impossible statues, all lurking on the peripheries of a town so familiar to tourists. The Other City is a guidebook to this invisible, "other Prague," overlapping the workaday world: a place where libraries can turn into jungles, secret passages yawn beneath our feet, and waves lap at our bedspreads. Heir to the tradition and obsessions of Jorge Luis Borges, as well as the long and distinguished line of Czech fantasists, Ajvaz's Other City—his first novel to be translated into English—is the emblem of all the worlds we are blind to, being caught in our own ways of seeing.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In Ajvaz's first novel to be translated into English, a Borgesian cohort of freakish creatures, talking birds and eccentric city dwellers lurk on the margins of an alternative Prague. An unnamed protagonist learns that a book written in an unearthly language is an opening to a dangerous world that is just around the corner from normal life. More and more frequently, the protagonist stumbles across scenes from the other city—he spies on an inscrutable religious service, is treated to a lecture on the subject of Latest Discoveries about the Great Battle in the Bedrooms. The city's inhabitants do not take kindly to his intrusions; he is pursued by weasels, shot at by a helicopter and nearly eaten by a half-man, half-shark. Meanwhile, overheard conversations dissolve into nonsense, elk are stabled inside statues and birds recite passages from an epic poem. Ajvaz's novel is a gorgeous matryoshka doll of unreason, enigma and nonsense—truly weird and compelling. (June)
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Review

"The novel is reminiscent of Surrealism in the way it departs from common experience and 'common sense,' attacks logical rules and customs, and takes things out of their familiar contexts. It is, however, a work more of invention and intellectual game than of spontaneous imagination. The ornamental imagery becomes fixed in obsessive formulae and configurations, and this is somewhat disproportionate to how it eludes definite, accepted meanings, and moves to other possibilities and worlds, which are protean and ever emerging, and to how it calls upon us to accept another cosmos. The setting is a textual maze from which there is no escape and whose ultimate meaning remains forever inaccessible, since the ultimate contexts are never emphasized." --Ceska Literatura

"The texts of the Czech writer Michal Ajvaz (pronounced EYE-voss) are evidence not only of a clever imagination, but also of a mind that savors the difficulty of reading--a mind for which language is not merely a vehicle for the delivery of information, but an integral part of the very world it is trying to communicate. Reading such a world means stepping inside it, letting it infect you, bruise, scrape, poison and obsess you." --Jonathan Bolton, CONTEXT

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Product Details

• Paperback: 148 pages
• Publisher: Dalkey Archive Pr; First English Translation edition (June 11, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1564784916
• ISBN-13: 978-1564784919
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.5 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #203,800 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Surreal, Beautiful and Fun, but Flawed, December 11, 2009

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James Oliver "It's a strange world. Let's kee... (Olathe, KS USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Other City (Eastern European Literature) (Czech Literature Series) (Paperback)

The Other City by Michal Ajvaz is by far the oddest book I have read this year and it has been quite a year for odd books. But where Smith's Only Forward and Harkaway's The Gone-Away World was odd because of the absurdity and, in the case of the latter, randomness found within, The Other City is odd because it presents a world of wonderment that exists all around us and that we willingly blind ourselves to. It is a world that is so alien to ours that a jungle can exist in a closet, that armies gradually turn into coats, and passenger ships voyage through the space between bookshelves. It is random and it is absurd, but unlike the aforementioned, it is not used for humor, nor is it strange for the sake of strangeness. Rather, the absurdity and the randomness is used to craft a fringe world so curious and surreal that it sucks the reader into its labyrinthine spaces, just as it does the narrator.

The most fascinating thing about this book, in terms of writing and not story, are the paragraphs. In our internet culture it is not uncommon to stumble across some post on a forum or a blog or wherever you may be that does not have a character or word limit that consists of one massive paragraph, Most refer to it as a wall of text and they are right to do so. No one likes them, no one wants to read them, and it is frustrating for all. I feel the same about books, mostly because the longer I read without some break the more likely I am to become distracted by thought or something shiny lurking across the room and have my concentration shatter to a thousand pieces. This was one of the main reasons I stopped reading Zelazny's The Guns of Avalon.

The Other City erupts spontaneously into pages-long passages consisting of one paragraph, usually of dialogue. This is something that I would expect to grate on my nerves, to frustrate me until the only end possible: putting down the book. Further, the passages are rambling and random, only just bordering on the edge of coherence and trying to figure out if it would rather hop the low fence and dance off into the chaos of insane gibberish. But, oddly enough, I found that I was not put off by these passages or by the fact that they were walls of text, horrendously long walls of text. It was just the opposite, in fact. Instead I was drawn deeper into the story, into the spaces between apartments and the underground chapels filled with aquarium statues, and before I knew it I was rushing headlong through these surreal narratives filled with the weird, wondrous, and fascinating. There were no breaks, no pauses, just the sustained, relentless, narratives that led on and on down the rabbit hole.

Which is not to say that I did not have my issues with the paragraphs. I soon discovered that I needed to devote my full attention to the book and in such cases everything becomes a distraction. There were times when either my mind would wander off on some loose thread or someone would interrupt me and I would be forced from the book. I returned to the passage only to find that I could not remember where I left off and the entirety of it was little more than a hazy recollection, which lead me time and time again to reread the entirety of the passage. Although, this is not to say that others will have the same issue with the book or have had the issue for that matter, it just proved a problem for me. Though I definitely do not hold it against it, as I feel the benefits gained from these overlong paragraphs far outweigh any negatives.

I also had an issue with the main character, our narrator, who seemed rather detached from everything. His various encounters with the other city are strange to start with and become increasingly bizarre as the novel progresses, yet there are very few times in which our narrator actually appears to be at all affected by any of it. There are a few times when he expressed wonder or is panicked and at the dead end of the novel he delights in the thoughts of all the oddities he might find, but beyond that he seemed to take everything in stride, as if everything was as it should be. Ah, but then there is metaphysical discussion of windows in the book that lends to why he may be more inclined to accept the other city more readily than others, so is this complaint even valid? I like to think it is, that even one who is inclined toward accepting an alien reality would still express a greater level of wonderment at what he finds.

A final issue: there were times when the same word might be repeated half a dozen times in one (shorter) paragraph. It is not a major issue, but it was distracting and, as I said before, The Other City is not the kind of book that takes well to lax attention. It being a translated work, I am not exactly sure who is responsible for the the repetition, Ajvaz or the translator. In the end, it does not really matter as it took nothing at all away.

The Other City is one of those books that show up from out of nowhere with not a bit a talk circulating around it and very few reviews. A shame, really, because books like this should be talked about, made known, and brought to the attention of unassuming readers everywhere who have no idea what they are getting into. More than that though, it is just an excellent piece of translated fiction, though I will be the first to admit that I am woefully uneducated in such areas, and a highly enjoyable read. I have no idea if Dalkey Press will be translating and releasing more of Ajvaz's work, but I look forward to getting my hands on it if they do.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Power of the Journey, February 26, 2010

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This review is from: The Other City (Eastern European Literature) (Czech Literature Series) (Paperback)

I love this book. It brings us to another Prague that "glimmers faintly close by, in the twilight of our nearest surroundings." The author depicts a bizarre, detailed, dream-like city that can be entered through simple doors, alleys or library corridors. Ajvaz' imagery and language are unlike anything I have come across recently and represents a strange hybrid of Kafka's sensibility and Dali's worldview. The author shows a fine sense of pacing. Just as he tempts the reader into strange and uncomfortable settings, made real by telling details, internally consistent unreality and exquisitely chosen words, the author transports us back to the real city before we can tire of his vision.

In the end, The Other City is a celebration of the courage needed to encounter the unknown. "The dread you feel on the preiphery of your world is the beginning of the bliss of return." There may be danger, but even defeat in the quest can merge with the joy of the journey and become part of it. What matters is the ability to enter a landscape from which society tries to protect us while, at the same time, denying us the right to become our true selves in the experience.

The narrator accepts this challenge: "I abandoned myself to the power of the journey and didn't know whether in the future the journey would command me to remain outside the walls, or to return with my knapsack full of tongues cut from the maws of dragons."

This is a compact gem of a book. The wonderful and surreal events endured by the narrator become, in the end, the as yet unknown and unformed challenges we face when we have the courage to embrace change. In image and message, The Other City marries the surreal to the mundane. This artful juxtaposition enriches and informs the readers' experience. Finally, "we are troubled by the dark music heard from over the border, which undermines our order." The question posed is whether we follow where the music leads us.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The invisible city, April 30, 2010

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E. L. Fay (New York) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Other City (Eastern European Literature) (Czech Literature Series) (Paperback)

Louis Aragon's 1926 novel/treatise/memoir "Paris Peasant" tried to re-imagine the function of mythology, which had once ordered and articulated a contingent, amoral universe. Aragon, a prominent member of the French Surrealist movement, sought to argue in favor of looking beyond the surfaces and reinventing the mundane into something wonderfully subjective. The modern world is still full of possibilities: you just have to be willing to look for them.

I had no idea that I also owned the uncredited sequel to "Paris Peasant." Now it is one thing to just think up new, radical ideas in literature. It is quite another thing to actually realize them. I don't think anyone truly succeeded in mythologizing the modern and wedding metaphysics to art and literature until Czech author Michal Ajvaz came along and wrote "The Other City" in 1993. "The Other City" is not simply a study of different modes of seeing and interpreting. It is not a treatise. It is a book that takes the Surrealist transformation of everyday objects and crosses the border into speculative fiction. It is simultaneously an argument in favor looking beyond and beneath words and surfaces, and the story of a man who discovers another world embedded in our own. Think of a cross between "Paris Peasant" and Italo Calvino's "Invisible Cities" and you'll have at least a partial idea of what Ajvaz has accomplished.

One snowy afternoon in a used bookstore, Ajvaz's unnamed narrator comes across a purple-bound volume written in an unknown language, accompanied by several strange illustrations. He takes it to a scholar, who is immediately unnerved and recommends that he put the book back and forget the whole thing. Instead, the narrator's curiosity is intensified, and he quickly finds himself wandering deep down the rabbit hole. As with "Last Nights of Paris," by Louis Aragon's compatriot Philippe Soupault, there is a very Surrealist preoccupation with chance and spontaneity. Although the narrator does have a fixed goal in mind - to learn more about this other dimension and eventually reach its core - the unfolding of his knowledge occurs not through rational, deliberate clue-seeking but via unexpected encounters with fantastical beings and bizarre situations, such as the time he wrestles with a shark behind a cafe and ends up impaling it on a cross held by a statue on the St. Nicholas parapet.

The speech of the otherworld denizens is appropriately meandering, full of long-winded nonsensical tangents and built on wild metaphors and unexpected juxtapositions that put me in mind of William S. Burroughs's "cut-up" method. The dialogue isn't simply randomness, however, or weirdness for the sake of weirdness. Ajvaz, through his haunting and beautifully jumbled prose, somehow articulates the inarticulate. As such, "The Other City" is deeply instinctive. That's the one word I can use to describe it. The language and spaces of the Other City are the dark areas under furniture and in the backs of drawers and camouflaged within the patterns of wallpaper. In a world that constantly seeks answers, to discover the Other City is to come close to the primeval source of being, where the mind expands, the nooks and cracks are filled in, and objects take on new forms. "Why are you poking your nose in our affairs?" an indignant citizen demands of the narrator. "Just remember: whoever crosses the border becomes entangled in the bent wires that stick out of things that you consider broken and which, in fact, have returned to their original form, as it was etched in the surface of a glass star wandering among the constellations." It is dangerous and dizzying, this search for the central plaza where a young god's body was torn to pieces by a tiger and meaning will be made real.

Or is the plaza truly the end of the journey? Are there cities upon cities upon cities, all layered on top of one another, and going not deeper and deeper towards the source but laterally extending into infinity? Ajvaz asks us to consider these questions, and many others. "The Other City" is both entertaining and thought-provoking, and I strongly recommend it.