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City Sister Silver |
Jáchym Topol is the best-known young writer in Prague, famous in his youth as an underground poet and songwriter, and now famous for writing the book that has most successfully and imaginatively captured the dislocation brought about by the fall of communism: City Sister Silver.
Winner of the Egon Hostovský Prize as the best Czech book of the year, City Sister Silver is also the only novel of the 1990s included on a list of the hundred greatest Czech prose works (from a survey of Czech writers and critics done by the newspaper Týden ("Week"); it came in #26).
Always surprising and fast-paced, City, Sister, Silver is at once satirical and romantic, wild and controlled. The novel is full of storytelling, myths, dreams and nightmares, shifting through a variety of genres. It is a novel for readers who want an unforgettable reading experience.
What makes City Sister Silver so special is its language, its energy, and its ability to creatively capture the feelings that accompanied the opening up of Central and Eastern Europe in the 90s. It is a truly breathtaking book. There is, however, a protagonist, Potok, and a love interest, whom he calls Sister. In short, this is not a realistic approach to an important historical watershed, but rather a unique, imaginative approach. As one Czech critic wrote, "City Sister Silver tells me more about the epoch than many of the books that try so hard to articulate and explain the burning ideas of the day."
"City Sister Silver is a first novel the way The Tin Drum and Midnight's Children were first novels - a prodigal astonishment; an emancipation proclamation."
- John Leonard, Newsday
"Readers embarking on City Sister Silver are in for an exhilarating, exasperating journey ... kaleidoscopic and ethereal, full of motion for its own sake, with many memorable stops along the route."
- Neil Bermel, New York Times Book Review
"Topol's book is a fervent effort by a post-Cold War writer to break away from the familiar dissident mode of his seniors and to stake out the fresh troubles that freedom--and, more to the point,a raw market economy have spawned since the Velvet Revolution."
- Patricia Hampl, Los Angeles Times Book Review
"Topol's phantasmagoric odyssey through a racketeering, polyglot, cultural stew of post-Soviet Bohemia has been acclaimed as the definitive novel of a Czech new wave.
Catbird Press does great service to bring it to anglophone readers."
- Choice
Web-link below includes first chapter and entire text in Czech links - Cat Bird Press have done a good job here. |
| © 2001; Jáchym Topol - Czech |
| This work can also be seen on web site: http://www.catbirdpress.com/bookpages/sister.htm |
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