Hail Czech author Michal Ajvaz!
I’ve entered The Other City, a novel serving as travel guide to a veiled Prague flourishing in the spaces above, below and in between the city's outer crust of stone, brick, wood, metal and the hum of humdrum routine.
Among the many mysterious, magical injections into everyday Prague, I beheld a large black fish sticking its head out of a tsunami’s wall of water to mock a library researcher, a green marble streetcar whose depot is in the courtyard of a monastery in Tibet, giant buzzing wasps, monsters lurking behind mirrors.
Full disclosure: not only have I entered The Other City, I have completely merged with the narrator. Thus I'll speak in the first person about one particular fascinating object: a purple book I discovered at an antiquarian bookseller's in Karlova Street.
What a book - a book with an unusually soft and smooth spine printed in an otherworldly alphabet, the letters rounded but with sharp points at the edges as if closed or enclosing shapes, convulsed and bristling, frequently appearing violently pierced by pointed wedges that penetrated their inner space from outside and elsewhere the bloated letters seemed to be bursting under the pressure of some expanding internal force. Then, falling asleep in bed that evening, rows of those rounded and spiny letters flashed in front of my eyes, squirming and writhing as they were transformed into snowflakes. Eerie, eerie - I could sense the book was silently and unobtrusively taking root in an intimately familiar space and soaking up its juices.
The next day when visiting the university library, I shared my find with a reference librarian. Unbelievably, he told me of his encounter with the very same script - only his book had rubies set into the spine of a leather binding that lit up the surrounding gloom - at the very moment he opened the clasp, a bright green light suddenly shone among the trees on the dark hillside outside his window. And at that very same moment the letters began to make a weird transformation as they lit up and then expired like glowing coals blown with a regular rhythm. Although he discouraged me from any future investigation, I didn't lose the yearning to discover the world from which the book with the unknown script had come.
I carried the purple book with me all the time. Eventually, I could recognize the individual letters, although I did not know the sounds they represented. I counted a total of seventy-six signs, a virgin forest full of disquieting seeds. I could sense tension in the shapes of the letters that suggested they grew out of anxiety. And there were those striking accent marks over the letters, inconspicuous little pothooks and loops that perhaps conveyed the main burden of the text, thus rendering the big letters as simply ornamentation. Or maybe those signs were remnants of an ancient heraldic language waiting for old gods to return. Who knows, maybe some victory lurks in the letters. But then again, perhaps there’s a darker, more sinister meaning: the letters are an evil gangrene that will gradually overwhelm everything.
I've said enough. I hope you are intrigued and will pick up a copy of Michal Ajvaz’s novel to take your own journey to the other Prague.
Czech author Michal Ajvaz, born 1949
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