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I, City
I, City is a novel about the city of Most in north Bohemia, an ancient city founded on a primeval wetland that was literally "relocated" to get to the brown coal beneath it. The city is the narrator, telling its own story through its inhabitants, who make their "appearances" in fleeting, ghost-like vignettes, Joycean epiphanies straight out of a Bohemian Dubliners. The "I" that purports to be Most seems to be an entire consciousness, at enough of a remove from the town itself that he, she or it can see and can know seemingly everything, past and present. As Most's inhabitants emerge from the pollution, or from the swamp of the town's founding, we find not individuals but representatives. Theirs are historical lives that mistrust history, or that live it at least with typical Czech irony. This abstraction, Brycz's making of archetypes, isn't accomplished in a spirit of abuse. Brycz obviously loves his "small" people, and has more than sympathy--he is one of them. As Brycz makes fictional people say factual things and factual people (Kafka, the Pope, the last president of Communist Czechoslovakia, Gustáv Husák) say fictional things, post-modernity via Marquez and other so-called Magical Realists makes its almost requisite--though noiseless--appearance.
Awarded the prestigious Jiří Orten Prize in 1999, I, City is many things: a novel-in-stories, a series of lyrical prose sketches in the best easterly European tradition of Danilo Kis, or Isaac Babel.
Awarded the prestigious Jiří Orten Prize in 1999, I, City is many things: a novel-in-stories, a series of lyrical prose sketches in the best easterly European tradition of Danilo Kis, or Isaac Babel.
Book Details
- Publisher: Twisted Spoon Press
- Publish Date: Nov 1st, 2006
- Pages: 156
- Language: English
- Edition: undefined - undefined
- Dimensions: 8.06in - 5.80in - 0.45in - 0.55lb
- EAN: 9788086264271
- Categories: • General
About the Author
Brycz, Pavel: - Pavel Brycz was born in 1968 in the Czech town of Roudnice nad Labem. A graduate of Prague's Drama Academy, he worked as a copywriter for an advertising agency where he produced the Czech slogan for KFC (roughly translated as "damn good chicken"). He is the author of six books. For I, City he was awarded the Orten Prize, and in 2004 he received the State Prize for Literature, its youngest recipient ever. In English his work has appeared in the anthology Daylight in Nightclub Inferno (Catbird Press, 1997). Currently he teaches Czech language and literature at a Gymnasium in Liberec, hosts a weekly children's program on Czech radio that narrates legends from around the world, and writes lyrics for the Balkan-chanson-folk band Zdarr.
Cohen, Joshua: - "Joshua Cohen was born in 1980 in New Jersey. He lived in Prague for a number of years, working as a journalist, essayist and editor for many publications, including the Prague Pill, Prague Literary Review, Czech Business Weekly, and Aufbau. His fiction has appeared in many journals -- such as Sleeping Fish, Fiction Warehouse, Zeek -- and anthologies, most recently in Text: UR - The New Book of Masks (Raw Dog Screaming Press, 2007). A recipient of first prize in The Modern Word's 2003 Short Story Contest and short-listed for the Koret Foundation's prestigious 2005 Young Writer on Jewish Themes Award, Cohen now resides in New York, where he is a regular contritbutor to The Forward. He is the author of A Heaven of Others and Aleph-Bet, An Alphabet for the Perplexed. Cohen was awarded a 2022 Pulitzer Prize for his novel The Netanyahus."
More books by Joshua Cohen
Praise for this book
Brycz pays tribute to his native Bohemian city of Most in this dreamy, disjointed series of vignettes, first published in 1998. The narrator is actually the city itself (located in the northwestern Czech Republic) and documents the follies of its youth, the vagaries of government and church, and the ravages of Soviet occupation. "I am not a hero," the city declares. "But when people on my streets and in my houses are truly human, I feel heroic." Most is portrayed here as a working-class city made up of migratory Germans, Czechs, Gypsies, Jews and poets speaking an "industrial conglomerate." Sometimes the city narrator waxes nostalgic, as when remembering lost sons of the city such as the Moravian singer and violinist Hanicka Hana, who settled in Most after World War II. Variously, the city marvels at the visiting Berolina Circus's polar bear act, witnesses sad partings between lovers and records good deeds (a taxi driver returns a teenage runaway to her parents' home). The voice of Brycz's battered city rings epic and authentic, while the translators' note offers an extensive history of Most.
-- Publishers Weekly
-- Publishers Weekly
I, City is an unconventional novel in that the only constant, and the only thing that might be called a character, is the setting -- the Czech city of Most. ... Though Brycz has dispensed with character and plot, here, he nevertheless avoids sliding into a detached-sounding narrative. I, City is warm and engaging throughout. Brycz's writing could be described as poetic and, in fact, he often breaks out of prose altogether. There are frequent line breaks, and he keeps his line starts fully left-justified (no paragraphs). He thus leans heavily towards the medium of poetry for a significant portion of the book. As a result, I, City feels like a fusion between a novel and a collection of poems, which suits the arrangement of short pieces very well.
-- Alasdair Gillon, The Edinburgh Review
-- Alasdair Gillon, The Edinburgh Review
The city's voice is dreamy, even slight, in what amounts to a clever and calculated critique of the city's depressed socioeconomic condition (the photos included in the book depict a seeming ghost town of crumbling buildings, Soviet-era apartment blocks, and strip mines). The whimsical tone is weighed down nicely here and there by more substantial chapters within which resonates a theme of confused identity ...
-- A.D. Jameson, The Review of Contemporary Fiction
-- A.D. Jameson, The Review of Contemporary Fiction
[T]he loose episodic structure of I, City and its democratic inclusion of diverse voice and perspectives owes a great deal to Bohumil Hrabal's collage technique of incorporating low-life characters into his stories and novels. In this way the otherwise irrelevant lives of small-town individuals are invested with a dignity denied to them by the grand narratives of twentieth-century history and ideology ... The central metaphor of the book--the anthropomorphic conceit of the city as a living person--is very much in the spirit of magical realism.
-- Alfred Thomas, The Sarmatian Review
-- Alfred Thomas, The Sarmatian Review