Picture a Jorge Luis Borges labyrinthine tale expanded to 500 pages and you've taken your first step in appreciating what Czech author Michal Ajvaz serves up in Empty Streets, his extraordinary novel of turbocharged inventiveness.
"As I imagined the terrible Cthulhu, suddenly I saw in it the figure that had been pursuing me these past few days. Might the double trident be a primitive representation of Lovecraft's horrific creature from the stars?"
So speaks the narrator, a writer living in Prague, hounded by the image of a peculiar double trident (pictured above), an image he first discovers in a junkyard on the outskirts of the city.
Mystery, mystery, eerie mystery surrounds the strange image of the double trident. And the writer's encounter with that image in the junkyard is only the beginning.
I'll give our writer/narrator a name, a hip Czech name befitting a writer: Gage, and Gage's next sighting occurs on his third evening stroll along the dark Prague streets following his trip to the junkyard. It's when, during his wanderings, he happens upon the shop where a graphic designer installed new programs on his laptop. He enters the shop, takes a seat and waits for the graphic designer to retrieve his laptop from the back room, Meanwhile, his attention is drawn to a screen and he watches as the lines on the screen wiggle, stretch, curve and then form into - gulp, the double trident.
The graphic designer returns and when asked, informs Gage that he created the changing, luminous character as a screensaver, one of a series he made to order during the previous year. Gage, in turn, describes his encounter with the double trident at the dump. The designer replies in astonishment, "How strange that you, too, should have come across it!"
So prompted, the designer relates the tale of his own bizarre sighting of the enigmatic image. It happened during one of his monthly visits to settle the rent with his landlord, an old, retired university instructor and literary critic. As per usual, he waited in the landlord's library.
One day, in the library, studying the painting hanging on the far wall, a practice he did repeatedly while in the room, a painting of a young woman with a childlike face and short fair hair sitting at a window, the unexplainable happened: "The building in the picture at the girl's back had a lot of windows, and all of them were dark. Then suddenly a light went on in one of them."
At this he jumped out of his chair and peered at the painting, his eyes inches from the canvas: what he could see in the apartment room, now lighted, was a picture in a gold frame, a picture of a double trident, purple, the very same trident Gage saw in the junkyard.
After a few minutes, the light in the window suddenly went out and all returned to darkness. He thought it must be a concealed device so he investigated the backside of the painting and the surface of the wall - nothing. When the old man returned, he relayed his experience but the old man said it was simply some kind of trick and to forget about it.
The very next day back at his apartment, Gage receives a telephone call: "My name is Jonáš," says the voice. Turns out, Jonáš got Gage's name and number from the graphic designer and he tells Gage he must meet with him, a matter of the upmost urgency.
Gage obliges and meets the old man at his home. He's ushered into the library and listens to the literary critic's tale, all the while gazing at the portrait of a young woman with a childlike face. As Jonáš explains, the portrait is of his daughter Viola, age twenty-four, who disappeared two years ago and hasn't been seen since.
Jonáš details Viola's life and travels in the months prior to her disappearance, her trip to America and the photographs she took while in New York. Gage has a sense of what all this is leading up to and his hunch proves accurate: Jonáš would like his help in finding dear missing Viola.
Gage is reluctant and for good reason: not only does he have his novella to work on but he vividly recalls Jonáš the professor of twenty years ago, a crusader of the socialist regime, a critic who would denounce any kind of art containing even a glimmer of imagination or playfulness.
But then it happened: as Gage considers Jonáš' proposal, all the while contemplating the portrait of Viola, he detects something in the painting that brings back a powerful childhood memory. The association is nothing short of irresistible.
What I've outlined above sets the stage for Gage's odyssey through the streets of Prague, forever on the lookout for clues surrounding both Viola and the uncanny symbol of the double trident, on odyssey where author Michal Ajvaz weaves a la Borges a web of philosophical and cultural intrigues.
One final tickler: Gage meets with a painter who recollects a time when his eyes beheld the double trident as a tattoo on Viola's stomach. Coupled with this revelation, the painter shares an insight about his own process of painting, "I realized that in trying to express what a thing communicated, I was making a thing of the communication - an unusual and fantastic thing perhaps, but just a thing nevertheless; and in so doing I was falsifying and damaging the communication, as things speak not of things but of what is not yet a thing, a matter from which things are formed."
Quizzical, amusing, beguiling, captivating - what an odyssey, what a novel.
Czech author Michal Ajvaz, born 1949
"I couldn't stop myself contemplating the real purpose of the thing. Could it be a weapon, some kind of catapult? Or it might be the body of a musical instrument: in terms of its shape it was somewhat reminiscent of a lyre. But with a catapult or a lyre there would need to be grooves for the affixing of a string or strings. I ran my fingers over the surface of the object, in so doing dislodging a few flakes of the green varnish: I encountered no groves or notches. But perhaps it was not an instrument or a tool at all. Could it be a work of art?" - Michal Ajvaz, Empty Streets
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