I, City

I, City is a novel about the northern Czech city of Most, an
ancient town 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
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 Gustav Husak) say fictional things,
post-modernity via Marquez and other so-called magical realists makes its
almost requisite -- though noiseless -- appearance. 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. Книга «I, City» авторов Joshua Cohen, Pavel Brycz оценена посетителями КнигоГид, и её читательский рейтинг составил 8.00 из 10.
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