City of Torment is, on one level, a family and generational novel, conveyed through the complex voice of a first-person female narrator whose subjectivity becomes elaborately intertwined with the main protagonist, EliÅ¡ka Beránková (Lamb). EliÅ¡ka/Daniela is searching above all for her dead father, but also for her dead mother and ultimately for herself. At the same time, on a more abstract level, Hodrová introduces a feminine structural dimension to a theme especially prevalent in 20th-century prose - the novel as a self-conscious genre, openly exploring the relationship of the author to her text. Hodrová's trilogy represents a distinct contemporary Czech voice in women's experimental writing, a genre first introduced to anglophone readers by Virginia Woolf.
I REMEMBER MY FIRST visit to Prague very well. I was a Polish teenager, and I went to Prague to see the Rolling Stones. They came because Václav Havel had asked them personally. He didn’t send a formal invitation; rather, he invited Mick and Keith for a few beers. The Stones loved it, of course, and quoted the message to the press. They skipped Poland on that world tour — a country that, in light of Havel’s fun invitation, probably seemed like a pompous and humorless neighbor. So, my school friends and I traveled to Prague, the most beautiful city in the world, as recently voted by readers of Time Out magazine. Its beauty, which had survived many wars, was both striking and surprising to us (especially since 90 percent of Warsaw’s original buildings had been destroyed in World War II). The Czechs always treated their capital as if it were the central character in their lives — Prague was always a human!
Daniela Hodrová’s Prague, too, has ears and eyes, and often a womb. Sometimes, it is a type of monster, haunting its inhabitants. Other times, it is a parlor inhabited first by Czech Jews then by a German family. A beautiful, sensual place, it frequently changes lovers. A “moving game of meanings and references,” as Hodrová notes in her 2006 book, The Sensible City, Prague is inhabited by both the living and the dead:
I am the pantry, the chamber of resurrection […] of shivering small-time thieves and masturbating youths. […] I am the chamber of suicides, and the chamber of dreamers. […] I belong to all those who enter me and soil me with their secret sins, with their petty vices. I take them all indiscriminately into my decrepit arms, press them to my hermaphrodite body, for I have lost all female charms in my old age, my source of femininity dried up long ago. […] I am a wasteland. […] I am what my visitors make of me, they come to gratify me as they would an aged harlot, only in moments of helplessness and anxiety.
London-based publisher Jantar has been bringing out Hodrová’s work in translation for over a decade. First, they released her mixed-genre “guidebook” Prague. I See a City… in 2011, then her 1991 novel, A Kingdom of Souls, in 2015. Now Jantar is putting out its most ambitious effort yet: a superb translation by Véronique Firkusny and Elena Sokol of a loose trilogy of novels, City of Torment. The novels were first published separately in the early ’90s by a provincial Czech publisher, to great critical acclaim but very little sales. When, in the late 1990s, they were rereleased as a beautiful compendium, with the elusive city of Prague at its center, Hodrová’s profile increased. She was awarded the Franz Kafka Prize in 2012; her book Točité věty (Spiral sentences) won the most prestigious Czech literary award, the Magnesia Litera, in 2016; and her academic work on the theory of the novel has been well received internationally, particularly in France and Russia.
Hodrová was never associated with the dissident movement in the former Czechoslovakia, and none of her writing was published in the underground but half-tolerated samizdat form. As a scholarly woman writing in a rather recondite literary tradition, she probably wasn’t taken very seriously by more “political” (male) authors, and she didn’t really care for them either, it seems. As it turns out, all this has stood her in good stead. The many “banned authors” of the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s were finally published in the early 1990s — and then the world basically lost interest in them, paving the way for “new voices” to emerge, including Hodrová’s. After she was awarded the Kafka Prize, whose winners include the likes of Harold Pinter and Margaret Atwood, Hodrová has even been proposed a few times to the Nobel Committee.
Although City of Torment is an experimental work, it is not a hard read. In the opening scene (a suicide, it seems, though this fact is not directly mentioned), the protagonist, Alice, falls out of a window, dies, is buried, and reconnects with her dead ancestors in a matter of seconds, as if she were Alice in Wonderland tumbling down the rabbit hole:
Alice […] would have never thought the window of her childhood room hung so low above the Olšany cemetery that the body could travel the distance in less than two seconds. […] Alice enters and sees her grandmother at the table, tears streaming down her cheeks. The table is spread with the Sabbath tablecloth. It occurs to Alice that maybe one day someone will have a dress made of it, a Sabbath dress.
In this very first scene, Alice’s faith and hope have been exchanged for death. This is Alice’s decision; she has agency, and she acts. She has not given up a life of possessions or material happiness; she has surrendered her life. What that fully means is revealed in the ensuing 600-plus pages. On one level, the story is a very personal account of things that happen to Alice during her short life, especially the goings-on she witnesses in her apartment building. On another level, it is a historical survey of Czech lands that begins, vaguely, in the first millennium and ends with the Velvet Revolution in November 1989. It’s also saturated with literary allusions — to Virginia Woolf, to Dante, to Tennessee Williams, to the Czech poet Karel Hynek Mácha … Have I missed anyone?
Over the course of the story and the complex history it recounts, Prague throws all sorts of grenades into the paths of its citizens. How Alice’s parents and neighbors absorb the explosions or return the grenades (with interest) becomes another layer in the life of the city. Actions taken hundreds of years earlier bring new outlooks and outcomes. History returns and bites hard. As Alice waits for a happy ending, her neighbors struggle to survive and love one another, while the city’s beautiful architecture — even the gargoyles on its cathedrals — come alive. Prague’s citizens might find some space to thrive for a time, but the city always wins.
City of Torment is magic realism on steroids. People turn into ghosts, then they become pupae. Characters begin to merge. Souls rustle in vases. Wings beat inside pillowcases. Fingernails on statues turn into claws. The dead swap bodies with one another, are spun and transformed into statues, are heard speaking softly in the pantry. Alice’s grandmother turns into a swan, her grandfather into a moth.
Souls cling to life through things, or rather through relics of things. As if these relics hold some kind of promise of being reborn, the pledge of a new life. There is, after all, the aura, that extraordinary fluid surrounding and animating things, which the dead perceive much more strongly than the living. To touch things is almost like touching life itself.
As I read further into the trilogy, I became aware of the distinctly feminine voice, an observing and structuring consciousness that grows increasingly more self-reflexive, openly exploring the relationship of the author to her text. The autobiographical connections are most apparent in the last and shortest novel in the sequence, Theta, when Hodrová touchingly describes the lives and deaths of her parents, friends, and husband, and what those lives meant to each other and to her. Now their ashes are mixed together in death:
That one, whose ashes had flown across the ocean and on 11 June 1985 at 10.50 a.m. were scattered by the hand of the Olšany sower, now steps lightly, she almost floats. At the end of the meadow she even takes a little leap (isn’t that called a jeté?), at the same time her legs come together in the air — that of course is an assemblé. She’s dancing — wonder of wonders. I’m probably dancing because my ashes have intermingled with the ashes of that ballerina, they also — this sounds very much like a novel — traveled across the ocean to Olšany, thinks Milada Součková, actually now half Yelena Rimská. It would be better to call her the Scattered One, because now she’s the writer and the ballerina in one and the same figure.
The novels also became a major part of the lives of their two excellent translators. For Véronique Firkusny, the journey began with her mother in the 1990s as they translated fragments of A Kingdom of Souls into English. The task continued in an intense six-year collaboration with Elena Sokol to translate and polish all three novels into this masterpiece.
It is difficult to disagree with the Icelandic poet Sjón when he describes Daniela Hodrová as “one of Europe’s best writers.” I could add something like, “one of the best writers you have never heard of,” but that really is not enough. This book can change your life, like it changed mine. Reading City of Torment has become an important and personal exercise in reading creatively, openly, and lightly — a practice we all need to learn. - Agnieszka Dale
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/prague-always-always-wins-on-daniela-hodrovas-city-of-torment/
Founded, according to legend, with the prophetic proclamation of the mythical Princess Libuše, Prague rose from a hilltop settlement to become the political and economic hub of Central Europe. Forged in stone, blood and bone over a thousand years it is a place dense with history, a city that cannot escape itself, often depicted as a labyrinthine maze of magic, madness and despair. City of Torment, a loose trilogy by Czech author and theorist Daniela Hodrová, falls into the literary tradition of writers like Karel Hynek Mácha, Gustav Meyrink and Franz Kafka in its portrayal of the city as a distorted space within which the individual can become lost or disoriented. Her Prague is a layered, cyclical place in which spatial and temporal dimensions shift, trapping its living and the ghostly inhabitants in a grand circle game, one that plays out again and again in a number of distinctive settings or “stages” throughout the city centre. As such, the narrative that runs through the course of the three novels that comprise City of Torment—In Both Kinds, Puppets and Theta—is fragmented, kaleidoscopic and cumulative, peopled by characters that defy boundaries between life and death, human and nonhuman, animate and inanimate.
There is no succinct way to provide an outline of City of Torment as a cohesive work of fiction; it is akin to an organic, evolving entity that gradually takes on a life that even seems to confound its own author by the time we reach the third part. It was not conceived as a trilogy. Hodrová began the first novel, In Both Kinds, in December 1977 and finished it the following year, but, like the two novels that would follow, it could not be published until after the fall of the Communist government. This work, narrated by an omniscient third person narrator that occasionally takes on the direct voice of a character or an object, is centred around an apartment block across from the famed Olšany Cemetery, and those who reside in or pass through in the building and the graveyard. It opens near the end of the Second World War, as young Alice Davidovich throws herself from the window of the building’s fifth floor flat to avoid being taken away to the gas chambers, thus making a direct transit from the building to the cemetery. Alice, who will spend much of her after-life repeating a fruitless rush to meet her beloved Pavel, is the central female protagonist in this first book, and provides a critical yet curious continuity linking the women at the heart of each of the following texts.
A wide cast of eccentric characters populate the pages of In Both Kinds. The living, the dead (recently and long dead), and the few who have found themselves charmed (or cursed) with the ability to negotiate a space in between the two states, exist alongside one another. Souls trapped inside inanimate objects, or transformed into birds interact on both sides (with both kinds) and, naturally, many characters will make the passage from the world of the living to the community of the dead over the course of the novel. Their personalities and the events or activities marking their lived existences follow them to their graves. Clothing and objects—a sweater, a coat, a mother of pearl button, a Persian lamb muff—become talismans, symbols (but of what?). And woven into all of this are historical personages and events that appear or are referenced, exaggerated or confined by the mythology that has grown around them over time. It is a strange and wonderful ensemble piece, but hanging over it all is a disquieting sense of directionlessness.
This sensation becomes more pronounced in the second novel, Puppets (Living Pictures), composed between 1981 and 1983. Composed of one hundred and twenty-six “living pictures” or vignettes, this novel focuses closely on Sophie Souslik, a seamstress at the Realm of Puppets, and her parents and grandparents. Prague with its warren of streets and public squares forms a wider backdrop against which the action—much of it imagined, remembered and echoed—is staged. And staged is the appropriate word, Prague has become a city of marionettes. But something darker lurks here. Specific spaces and objects, like the courtyard with its rug beating rack or Sophie’s father’s office with its heavy black furniture and spinning chair, hold special powers and seem to become portals to painful personal and historical pasts, hidden or forgotten. There is a significant and welcome crossover of characters from In Both Kinds as well as new characters that sometimes act as alternate versions of previous actors. For example, Sophie is sometimes mistaken, at least briefly, for Alice Davidovich, and she also has a boyfriend named Pavel. Identities are frequently confused, experiences are repeated merging the familiar with the strange, and characters increasingly begin to change—humans metamorphize into insects and birds, while statues and household objects fall in love with people and long for release from their solid states. Still, an atmosphere of detachment colours the text.
With the third and final novel, Theta, composed between December 1987 and January 1990, the project that will become City of Torment begins to take form (the books will ultimately be published individually before being gathered together into a single volume). It opens with a variation on the first lines of Dante’s Inferno. Prague is now clearly depicted as its own special version of hell, a city of torment. The title, Theta, has a double meaning—it’s association with death, Thanatos, and its use, θ, as a proofreader’s symbol for “delete”—and as soon becomes apparent, “this novel” now exists an entity within itself. Here, the solitary, curious female protagonist, Alice and Sophie’s heir/doppelgänger, is Eliška Beránková (Lamb). But, not only is she less satisfied to stay within the confines of the text, Daniela Hodrová continually allows the boundary between herself and her creation to blur, even disappear. In a full metafictional turn, the author enters her own novel, and, at one point, Eliška steps out and tries to become a living being. Fiction and fact clash. Some new characters that initially appear to be entirely the product of the text grow more transparent. Others openly straddle the line between fact and fiction. For example, Hodorva introduces her real life husband, trying and failing to keep to the fictional name she assigns him. She grants Eliška imitations of her own life, consciously negotiating her two identities as the manuscript on her desk grows. Through her alter ego, Hodrová, the author, merges with the central figure who is descending into the city of torment in search of her own past.
If this all sounds like an overload—and these are densely packed works—Hodrová writes with a style that constantly refers back on itself, without being repetitive, so the reader does not lose track of who is who. Her narrative second guesses itself constantly (questioning meaning in parentheses) implying that nothing is certain, nothing is written in stone. There is, however, much more going on beneath the surface—historical, literary and place references that would likely be less of a mystery to those familiar with Prague—but for a visitor stumbling into her City of Torment with less background, the Appendix that closes out the work might not quite suffice. So I turned to Hodrová’s Prague, I See A City…, written after the completion of the trilogy, first as an alternative guidebook, but then released as a kind prologue/companion piece to her major work. A short, engaging, magical exploration of her hometown, this book is a perfect follow-up read, not only because it will fill in some of the biographic, geographic and historical details behind the novel, but because, written in 1990, in the aftermath of the Velvet Revolution it looks forward, however cynically, to new possibility, with hope of shedding the weight that had oppressed the previous decades.
As noted earlier, the first two novels of City of Torment are characterized by a certain flattened affect and sense of detachment. Composed during the restrictive Normalization period under the Communist government of the 1970s and 1980s, Hodrová was writing without knowing if, or when, it might be possible to release her fiction. It must have felt akin to writing into a void in a world where the dead seemed more alive than the living. The final novel was composed at the end of this period, a time of turmoil, and, when the government fell she stopped writing it, not knowing how a dynamic text informed by a city (or a city formed by a text) might now be altered. In Prague, I See a City… she says of this time:
A revolution of words, an almost fairground battle of words really did take place last year, though its tumult now reaches us only dimly. The city is once more slipping back into its sleep, its unconsciousness, its oblivion.
In those November days, something fundamental happened to the life of this city, to my life. I finished writing Theta at the very moment the battle broke out, for at that moment the city ceased, at least briefly, to be a city of torment.
Far from a conventional travel guide, Prague, I See a City… serves as an immediate refocusing of Prague after the fall of Communist Czechoslovakia and as an introduction to Hodrová’s world-view. As she wanders her city, as if in a dream, the boundaries between the real and the imagined blur. The city she sees is perhaps on the cusp of a new beginning, but the weight of the past, historical and literary will not pass lightly. She reflects on her own childhood, comments on the novels of her trilogy, and visits museums, St Vitus Cathedral, Prague Castle and other sites, evoking the lives of long dead kings and more recent political environments along the way. Published before the recent complete translation of the trilogy, this book could easily be read first, and for its own merits alone, but it is just as effective (if not more so) read as an extended (and exceptionally entertaining) epilogue that offers a fuller understanding of both Hodrová’s literary vision and her idiosyncratic relationship with Prague.
In Both Kinds is a revised translation by Véronique Firkusny and Elena Sokol (an earlier English translation by Tatiana Firkusny and Véronique Firkusny was published in 2015 as Kingdom of Souls). Puppets is translated by Elena Sokol and Véronique Firkusny, and Theta is translated by Elena Sokol. Prague, I See a City… is translated by David Short.
Daniela Hodrová, A Kingdom of Souls, Trans. by Véronique Firkusny and Elena Sokol, Jantar Publishing, 2015
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Daniela Hodrova shares her unique perception of Prague, through playful poetic prose, and by imaginatively blending historical and cultural motifs with autobiographical moments. A Kingdom of Souls is the first volume of this author's literary journey - an unusual quest for self, for one's place in life and in the world; a world that for Hodrova is embodied in Prague.
“Through playful poetic prose, imaginatively blending historical and cultural motifs with autobiographical moments, Daniela Hodrová shares her unique perception of Prague. A Kingdom of Souls is the first volume of this author’s literary journey — an unusual quest for self, for one’s place in life and in the world, a world that for Hodrová is embodied in Prague.” - From the introduction by Elena Sokol
A Kingdom of Souls is the first in a Prague-trilogy, the novel itself dated: "December 1977-October1978, June 1984" but only published after the fall of the Communist regime. Its prime locale and vista is the Olšany cemetery -- or at least a building opposite it, specifically a fifth floor apartment -- but even as much of the action is focused here it is a sweeping novel of Prague, and the modern Czech experience, since the Nazi occupation. It begins with one character dead(-but-not-entirely-departed), a presence in the pantry of that fifth floor apartment -- and he is soon joined by others, the small chamber eventually getting quite crowded. In a A Kingdom of Souls death isn't a complete release, and the dead figure just as much as the living.
There are several prominent characters in this novel of criss-crossing stories, but the central one is young Alice Davidović, longing and waiting for her beloved, Pavel Santner. But as the novel opens Pavel Santner had left with a transport two weeks earlier, and the possibility of their reunion seems slight; Alice never entirely gives up hope -- and yet also does so almost immediately, in shocking fashion. It is the time of the Second World War; Alice's family is Jewish; they too "were to join a transport" .....
Hodrová's novel is one of history, and characters whose stories are not fixed and definitive, not absolute (so also in the dead continuing to be very real presences, even if on an entirely different plane). As she writes at one point in the narrative:
That's how it happened, but perhaps it happened somewhat differently.
The novel, and its stories, are fluid -- and flowing into and out of one another. The past -- and the dead -- linger and blend into the present -- right down to the onion-smell that remains in the Davidovićs' old apartment.
Beyond the individual characters, dead and alive, this is also a novel of objects and places, many of Hodrová's short chapters giving voice to the inanimate: "I am the Olšany Cemetery", for example (where its past incarnation -- as vineyard -- also still blends into present), or: human skin, or a silkworm (with its shifting identity, from egg to caterpillar to moth), or a dressmaker's dummy called Kain. One chapter describes the souls of this 'kingdom of souls' -- "endowed with a capacity for infinite metamorphoses and reincarnations" --, another the nation itself:
I am the nation disillusioned by its revolutions and its occupations, even by its sacrifices to fire.
One chapter gives voice to Alice's muff -- an object that figures at various points in the story as well, symbolic, like so much in this novel, in so many ways.
Hodrová's poetic, elegiac, and dark novel doesn't lend itself to summary; fluid seems the best description -- and slippery too. In a way it is a small, domestic novel, following several of the inhabitants of the same house -- and especially that fifth-floor apartment -- across the decades, but in keeping roles for the dead -- separated from and yet still as real as the living -- Hodrová explodes the traditional house/hold novel.
History, too, pervades the story -- but it is subtly woven, determinative but still background, in in a text that is filled with allusions. A commentary on Czech history -- sometimes very direct ("I am the nation disillusioned by its revolutions and its occupations") -- it is also movingly personal. Equally effective is her use of the inanimate -- which often has a very different scale of time and change --, as real and significant as any of the human beings.
A Kingdom of Souls is a dark and elusive novel, but it is also seductive. Hodrová's precise expression (in this fine translation) and unexpected perspectives make for an impressively disturbing, compelling text. - M.A.Orthofer
I actually approached the publisher for a review copy of this novel. This is unusual as I normally receive my review copies via Netgalley or Edelweiss, but this is a book about Prague and I am a Czechophile. Prague of course was influential on magic realism, given the importance of Kafka. Indeed this is the fourth magic-realist book I have reviewed on this site that features that great city. As in many of Meyrink's writings the central character of this book is Prague and in particular a small area of Prague focused on an apartment block overlooking the Olsany cemetery.
Q & A with Véronique Firkusny and Elena Sokol
An excerpt from A Kingdom of Souls won the 1992 Virginia Faulkner Award for Excellence in Writing.
Daniela Hodrová won the 2012 Franz Kafka Prize and the 2011 Czech State Award for Literature.
Excerpt from Prague. I see a city...
Originally commissioned for a French series of alternative guidebooks, Hodrová's novel is a conscious addition to the tradition of Prague literary texts by, for example, Karel Hynek Mácha, Jakub Arbes, Gustav Meyrink and Franz Kafka, who present the city as a hostile living creature or labyrinthine place of magic and mystery in which the individual human being may easily get lost.
Suffused with the atmosphere of the year following the fall of the Communist regime, Prague. I see a city… takes the form of a novel of quest, in which the heroine abandons the material world of everyday society and linear history, perceiving it as false, temporary and distracting, and journeys in search of her true identity.
With a foreword by Rajendra A. Chitnis, Senior Lecturer, Russian and Czech, University of Bristol.
"We published Prague, I See A City... because we view it as an amazing work of literature. It can be viewed as a novel, a biography, a guide to Prague, a history of Prague or just simply an amazing piece of literature. We have been astounded by the number of readers who have downloaded the e-book version in the United States. We only made it available in an e-version because one of our founders wanted to experiment with the format. In the end, we didn't experiment with the format at all; we just put the text out there. We have a grand plan for a second edition of the e-book to include photos of the city from the author's own collection and taken by others. I love the idea of people wandering around Prague with their Kindles or iPads or whatnot, reading the text and looking at the places mentioned in the book."-- Michael Tate, director of Jantar Publishing
Let me start with a book, Daniela Hodrová’s Prague, I See a City…, a slim and disorienting text—maybe a novel, maybe a travel guide—in which Hodrová navigates the interdependence of Prague and her personal life. The book was originally commissioned as an alternative guidebook for French tourists after the fall of the Soviet Union. But as Hodrová completed the book, it evolved into an achronological menagerie comprising legends, memoir, literary criticism, and the occasional theater recommendation.
Paraphrasing the gospel of John, Hodrová opens the book, “In the beginning, the city was, to me, a word—Prague.” It was a sound she heard in her crib, it was the shredded headlights of passing trams striping her ceiling with light, it was “a beast of prey sleeping somewhere far away.” The city was watching and waiting. For what? she asks. “For me to come?”
What I knew about Prague, when I first read Prague, I See a City…, could be categorized as a series of verifiable facts. Years before reading her book I had spent three days in the city. I was twenty-two, fresh out of college, an incorrigible coward who signed up for tour after tour, never daring to explore alone. I walked in stride with the guides. I carried a journal and asked pertinent questions, filling my pages with facts. “Defenestration,” I wrote in my journal, “throwing someone from a window.”
Like Franz Kafka, my education had done me great harm. I was so very proud of myself for taking diligent notes. I asked my guides, “How many others take notes?” The guides, who lived off the tips and knew what I wanted to hear, answered, “Very few put in the effort.” I believed that I could experience Prague by memorizing its relevant dates. But what I experienced was the promise and pitfall of tourism: I saw what others already have. I learned what others already knew. The effect is deadening, it isolates, as I learned. After the tours ended I was often beset by incredible loneliness. I did not go out at night. When invited out I made up excuses: I needed to write in the morning and wanted to keep my head clear. Alone in the hostel, I ate mountains of chips and threw up. I returned to the states clutching a notebook loaded with fragmented, irrelevant facts:
“Don Giovanni written in honor of Czechs.” “Zizka—general 15th century.” “Scraffito—plaster, whitewashed, pattern scratched out.”
Prague, I See a City… chases what Hodrová cannot forget. It is a guide to Prague’s subconscious, to the network of feelings that arise between person and place—think Jane Jacobs tornadoed by chaos theory. Early on, Hodrová showcases this phenomenon through a series of tableaux vivants. The city, it turns out, is also a theater. She envisions scenes playing out in Wenceslas Square: The Slavs arrive in Bohemia; the Bohemian Princess Libussa prophesies a “great city, its glory touching the stars”; King Wenceslas, that apocryphally jolly old man, murdered on the steps of a church; Jan Palach’s self-immolation; Tycho Brahe’s courteous bladder. These scenes are unfettered, inviting, impactful. And through them we discover what guidebooks attempt to exclude, the guide’s subjective experience:
I am passing the asylum in St. Katherine’s Convent. Twenty years ago I would accompany my mother here every Sunday evening, she suffered from endogenous depression. Then from Monday to Friday she would look out of a window in the ward onto the hospital garden, onto which, from the other side, from Purkyne’s house, Albert Einstein would look and work out his theory of relativity. In the end, a tumor grew on my mother’s brain and they only discovered it when it was the size of an apple. To this day, they are looking at each other—the famous physicist and my insane mother, both long dead.
“Forgetfulness,” Paul Valéry writes, “is a godsend that history is always trying to corrupt.” Hodrová invites the corruption of history. For most of us, the past is a mutt locked in a cage, growling incessantly, placated with the occasional treat, but for Hodrová the past endlessly barrels through her apartment, peeing on carpets, chewing remotes, shedding all over the couch. ***
I returned to Prague shortly after reading Hodrová’s book. I was there on a fellowship for a writing conference. During the first few days of the conference, I told no one I had already been to Prague. I did not want to answer for my previous stay. The lie was part of a plan. This time I would be gregarious, friendly, and happy. This trip would be different, I hoped, secretly expecting it wouldn’t.
Out to dinner, I met Kyle: a former punk who still hadn’t shaken off the attire—I remember him only in black. He had angel food cheeks; his front teeth were squeezing a hunk of barbecued meat. Friendship, great friendship, necessitates a unique rhythm of language. Admittedly, I have never had many friends, but the few great friendships I’ve had have begun as mine did with Kyle: drunken flights of emotion, enthusiastic confessions, an authenticity unanticipated and inescapable.
Early into dinner, he asked, “Have you been to Prague?” Instinctively, I quoted one of my favorite movies, Noah Baumbach’s Kicking and Screaming, the famous line: “Oh, I’ve been to Prague.” In unison, Kyle and I finished the rest: “Well, I haven’t ‘been to Prague’ been to Prague, but I know that thing, I know that, ‘Stop shaving your armpits, read The Unbearable Lightness Of Being, fall in love with a sculptor, now I realize how bad American coffee is’ thing…”
For the rest of the night we exchanged stories of woe: I told the one about stealing a TV from my high school. Kyle told the one about his younger brother being arrested. My stepbrother had had his throat slit. Kyle’s dad often cried on the floor of his bedroom. My seventh-grade friends once sat me down and advised me to find other friends. It went on like this, each story a little bit sadder, but never painful to recall, far funnier than the original experience. ***
Prague is a city of layers. A palimpsest resting atop its earlier selves. Hodrová muddles these layers. Like a napoleon pastry pounded to slop, Prague, I See a City… is deliciously messy. She collapses Prague’s historical eras, unifying the commercialized Wenceslas Square with its revolutionary antecedents, H&M and T.G.I. Fridays superimposed over the Velvet Revolution’s jangling keys, the flames of Jan Palach’s self-immolation charring the walls of a McDonald’s.
A city is the collaboration of its dissonant parts. A person? Exactly the same. Hodrová not only captures manifold versions of Prague, but the flight of the mind as it tries to remember, as it tries to create a singular person out of the past. My memory of Prague has become a series of images, scenes experienced and imagined that I can reenter at will: Kyle and I eating the pages out of a book. A metronome, red as a big bloody finger, wags where a statue of Stalin once stood—a statue so dense it took two months to demolish. Kyle and I lounge at its foot, drinking shandies, as the metronome rustfully groans. Freud hangs in an alley. Little Franz Kafka, tall as a knee, ambles to school through Old Town Square, passing flaneurs walking their turtles.
On Kyle’s last day in Prague, we hung out in the train station’s Burger King. We discussed the woman he had fallen in love with at the conference, the woman he asked to move to Detroit. Appalled and confused, she declined. Two days earlier he had given me a book—Tao Lin’s Eeeee Eee Eeee, a book that meant a lot to him—and now he asked what I thought of it. I hadn’t liked it, but I did, I told him, love the gesture, love the inscription he wrote inside the cover. Together we envisioned the book heavy with dust on a shelf, my shelf, twenty-five years in the future, a symbol of the start of our friendship. We laughed, sadly, then I got up and he got up, we hugged and we promised, so many promises, promised to write to each other, to talk every day, to visit, and anyone watching would have thought that we meant it—I did mean it, I think. But after he left and I left I thought about all the friends I had lost, the friends ghosted by distance, and I wondered, What chance did our friendship have outside of Prague? I feared finding out. On the walk back to my flat I stopped at the bookstore where Kyle had bought Eeeee Eee Eeee new and I sold it back for 50 Czech crowns, roughly two dollars, and used the money to buy an espresso. - Alex McElroy
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