| Title | : | Empty Streets (Czech Literature) |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 1564787001 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9781564787002 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 470 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 2004 |
| Awards | : | Cena Jaroslava Seiferta (2005) |
Empty Streets (Czech Literature) Reviews
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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 -
A captivating novel in a permanent skirt on the edge of the ridiculous, featuring a blocked writer who ventures forth in search of the meaning of an obscure motif. Each character encountered likes to speak in super-articulate monologues, pulling the protagonist further into an unsolvable web of intrigue that ends up being solved (pardon the spoiler). If the reader can tolerate the strangeness, then this long novel will provide a lasting mystery long after the riddle has been solved: a call to explore the dark fringes of the urban and to find connections and meaning in everything.
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I don't even know where to begin with this one. I hate writing reviews of magisterial, yes, magisterial works like this one. A review's purpose, partly, is to get people to want to read stuff because you think it's awesome. "Streets" is easily in the top five best books written in the current century. A reviewer's purpose is also to tell you why, but sometimes you're just stumped. I could revert to comparisons? A treasure hunt as imagined by the love-child of David Lynch and Kurt Vonnegut? A never-hopeless meditation on the eternality of art and the destruction of art as written by a more dada-esque and more cheerful Dostoevsky?
How about the plot? Guy finds weird symbol. Weird symbol was tattooed on groin of missing young woman. Search ensues. But that barely covers a scrap of it and it's so beautifully written, slow, hypnotic, and plodding that bits of it drift back into your consciousness even as you are failing miserably at reviewing it.
Just trust me on this one and go get it! -
Kdybych měl jmenovat své nejoblíbenější autory, bude mezi nimi Ajvaz. Pokud by se mne někdo zeptal na nejlepšího českého autora, řeknu zase Ajvaz. Je tedy jasné, že nejsem objektivní zdroj ani za mák a kromě chvalozpěvů na Ajvaze dál nic neuslyšíte. Nu, vzhůru na kůr k hlasům nebeským.
Snad trochu té disharmonie. Všechny knížky od Ajvaze jsou maličko stejné. Ne tak stejné jako ty od Pratchetta, nebo Christie, ale dejme tomu stejně stejné jako ty od Borgeze, nebo opusy Umberta Eca. Pokaždé, když čtu nového Ajvaze, mám pocit, že jsem znovu otevřel Návrat starého varana a zjistil, že uvnitř je další kniha, která mne při předchozí návštěvě unikla. Užiju si to stejně, jako minule.
Podobnost s Borgesem je možná příliš křiklavá a tak nabízím jiné srovnání: Locus Solus Raymonda Roussela - ostatně měl bych se pokusit časem napsat něco i tomto díle, jinak budu mít pocit provinění. Myslím, že surrealismus obou pánu (Ajvaze a Roussela) má k sobě blízko. Součástí vyprávění je vždy tajemná situace až mystického charakteru, kterou následně vypravěč propojí s realitou řetězcem běžných událostí, čímž nemyslím bagatelizuje. Do soukolí orloje vyprávění přibude další kolečko, ale dojem z celku nezmizí, spíše se umocní. Umění zanechat čtenáře ohromeného i po odkrytí všech triků je znakem mistra magie. Ajvaz je mistr.
Dějovým rámcem Prázdných ulic je pochopitelně město. Kdybych ho měl popsat, je to město bez centra, město složené z periferií, které se časem rozprostřely po celém světě. Pokud vás to neurazí, představte si Brno, pokud jste brňák, zkuste třeba Zlín. Vypravěč - a není pochyb, že je to sám Ajvaz - nalezne v ruinách určených k likvidaci zvláštní symbol. Autorovo pátrání po jeho původu je pak obsahem děje, přičemž (odpusťte mi ten příměr) se zdá, jako by magickým hybatelem všech událostí byl právě tento znak z minulosti. Minulostí je asi socialistická totalita, v níž umělci tvořili podivná, dávno zapomenutá díla v malých uzavřených skupinách a jejich práce znal jen úzký kroužek přátel, ale nepopírám, že se může jednat jen o moji osobní nostalgickou projekci. Důležité je, že znak cestou z minulosti do přítomnosti do sebe nasál mnoho příběhů, které vypravěč postupně ku potěše čtenáře odhalí.
Možná je moje fascinace Prázdnými ulicemi dána i osobní zkušeností. Také jsem před lety s kamarády našel zvláštní znak na zdi a povedlo se nám odhalit jeho původ i význam. Co následovalo bylo stejně dobrodružné jako Prázdné ulice. A taky jsem žil v socíku, v prázdných ulicích obydlených jen náznaky. -
Around every corner, a possibility, a mystery, a connection waiting to be found that will draw you around yet another corner, pulling you in deeper and deeper until you can't remember where you entered the labyrinth, or why. That may not sound appealing at first, but you have to remember that at every turn you get to hear a story, usually a puzzling story that raises more questions than it resolves, but an entertaining story nonetheless. Thus goes the majority of Ajvaz' Empty Streets. Is it the best book by Ajvaz? Nope. Is it a good place to start in the author's body of work? Probably not. Does Ajvaz present themes and ideas better here than in his other works? No again. Is it an entertaining book, well worth reading? Yes.
It's hard to speak about this book without speaking about the other two novels by Ajvaz previously translated into English, The Other City and The Golden Age. The Other City is the story of someone discovering another, hidden city that exists in the cracks of Prague. The Golden Age is an exploration of meaning versus meaninglessness and the art of storytelling generally. Empty Streets is an amalgam of these two things, as it's the story of someone discovering a hidden side of the city of Prague that explores the ideas of meaning and storytelling. The problem with Empty Streets is that it isn't the perfect combination of these ideas that Ajvaz has previously explored, instead it's retreading ground that Ajvaz already covered so masterfully in his previous work.
I'm oversimplifying, of course, as there are numerous differences. Empty Streets still feels fantastical compared to most books you're likely to read, but it's far more grounded than The Other City and The Golden Age, and I can see that appealing to some people more (even though that wasn't the case with me). It's also a more substantial work, longer than the other two books combined, so in reading it you are fully immersed in the mysteries that the book presents in a way different from the other two books. Finally, Empty Streets speaks to some artistic topics not touched upon by the previous works, and has interesting things to say about them. Still, I can't help but conclude that The Other City is a better place to start, and more entertaining overall, and that The Golden Age is the more intellectually interesting choice.
The thing is, though, Empty Streets is only flawed compared to the other books by Ajvaz, which are some of my favorites. Looked at independently from those books, this is a fascinating and fun story, the likes of which are exceedingly rare. It's beautifully written, with the individual stories interspersed throughout the book being entertaining in their own right, and stitched together to become something more than the sum of its parts. Tracking down the origins of a mysterious symbol, the narrator of Empty Streets is pulled into the search for a missing woman who seems to have interacted with a strange cast of characters in pursuit of some unknown goal, with the hunt for her progressing through coincidences, chance encounters, or sometimes plain dumb luck. The girl and the symbol both lead the narrator to stories, all fantastic to some degree, and what you believe, or trust, or expect gets turned on its head more than once.
While not my favorite by Ajvaz, I still enjoyed this book and the ideas it explored. Normally I would be upset that I had once again run out of Ajvaz, but Dalkey Archive has already bought the rights to his book Voyage to the South, so it seems like we will have even more Ajvaz available in English before too long. I look forward to reading that book as well. -
Michalova pomsta.
S něčím tak rozvlááááááááááčným jsem se dlouho nepotkala. I když zápletka je téměř detektivní a slibuje napětí, podstata knížky tkví ve vyprávění podivuhodných příběhů a malování fantaskních světů a zvuků a veškerý potenciál napětí se tím naprosto rozmělnění. V určitém směru byly ale některé z těch obrazů, které Ajvaz stvořil, kouzelné a nepochybně je to svým způsobem a hlavně rozsahem úctyhodné dílo. Které by se ale na druhou stranu dalo stejně dobře považovat za jistý sklon k slovní onanii, případně za snahu autora stvořit takovou svoji Oranžovou (nebo vlastně červenou?) knihu, což pak pro mě zavání nepěkným narcismem. Obávám se, že za pár týdnů bych stěží dala dohromady víc než hrubý obrysy příběhu a to především kvůli té zápavě různých vedlejších příběhů a motivů. Pokud by to bylo celé třeba o půlku kratší, určitě by to bylo mnohem stravitelnější.
To, že nakonec všechno mělo víceméně logické až všední vysvětlení, i když po těch všech bizardních odbočkách by možná do příběhu líp zapadalo UFO, mi nevadilo, ale úplně jsem se nesrovnala s momentem, kdy po 400 stránkovém plahočení (mým i vypravěčovým) a odkrývání všelijakých indicií, vedla k vypátrání Violy pouhá náhoda. To mě vlastně zklamalo, až jsem si říkala, jestli má takovouhle chatrnou berličku autor s takhle přebujelou fantazií fakt zapotřebí.
Jo, a taky nesmím opominout pocit deja-vu hnedka na začátku, kdy jsem si říkala, proboha, další redaktor se zlomeným srdcem o které se chce podělit s publikem, jen to ne. Naštěstí pak svojí energii upřel do pátrání po ztracené dívce a za to má ode mě plusové body.
P.S. Podle mamky je to takový barkoní..hmm -
Enthralling mystery (with just a hint of thriller?) reminiscent of the works of Jostein Gaarder, especially “The Solitaire Mystery” and “Sophie’s World” (and his signature story-within-a-story concept). One of those books that just won’t let you put it down (I know ALL books are like that, but some more than others) ✨
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Empty Streets, which was originally published in Czech in 2004, is the third of Michal Ajvaz's novels to be published in English translation by Dalkey Archive Press, and the third that I've read and enjoyed. This one is set in Prague in the summer of 1999: when it opens we meet our unnamed narrator, a writer who's working on a novella but is finding himself buried in paper and unable to tame the story he's trying to write, which is a "mass of restless, elusive, metamorphosing, barely legible pages" that's taken over his desk and is "turning into a monstrosity" (4). He takes a walk to take a break, and cuts through a dump on a construction site; he steps on a strange wooden double-trident, and finds himself dreaming up fantastical uses for it as he tries to figure out what it is/does/is for. And then he sees the symbol again, as a screensaver on the computer of a designer he knows, who tells him the story of how he rents a room in a villa from an old man, and saw the double trident appear and disappear again in a framed picture. After which the narrator gets a call from the designer's landlord, Jakub Jonáš, who tells him the picture is a portrait of his 24-year-old daughter, Viola, who disappeared two years ago.
Despite his initial reluctance, the narrator finds himself agreeing to look for Jonáš's daughter: as the novel progresses, he finds himself caught up in the search, crossing from one part of the city to another following different leads and hearing different stories that might be related to Viola and/or the strange symbol and/or other possible mysteries that surface along the way. I like the way the stories gradually unspool, the way one person leads the narrator to another and then the way that person leads him on to the next. I found myself thinking, a bit, of the TV show Search Party, with our narrator as analogous to Alia Shawkat's Dory: they're each at a point of being stuck in life/work, and for each of them, a mystery rouses them to action, though there's rather less melodrama in Empty Streets. It's hard to say more without getting into the lovely convolutions of this book's plot, which I think are best experienced without knowing much beforehand.
So I'll just close with an image I like a whole lot: Ajvaz's narrator has been watching a TV show in which "people at a mansion in (probably) Scotland untangle problems in their love affairs" (26). He then looks out the window, to other apartments on his street, and notices that "In almost every window the light gained and lost intensity to the same rhythm, as the residents of the Scottish mansion moved from the darkness of the drawing room to the terrace and back again" (28). -
[Review of the Dalkey Archive Press English Translation]
Through and through a 'Dalkey Archive' style book, which is to say pretty unlike any other book you have read, and unlike any Dalkey Archive Book you might have read as well.
'Empty Streets' is sort of like a literary magic trick where the magician shows you how the trick is done, and yet revealing the trick does not totally destroy the entertainment value, though the initial mystique does diminish.
The novel takes the form primarily of events being related to the narrator and so in a way is sort of like a series of linked short stories.
There are points where the narratives drag, a lot of them in fact. The feats of imagination here are pretty spectacular however, a totally convincing world is created with a degree of parsimony and detail which is rarely seen outside of 'high' fantasy or sci-fi works.
Too, at times it felt sort of like a post-modern tool box: lots of theoretical and aesthetic ideas are raised and discussed by the characters, some of which are sort of bunk others which are pretty compelling. -
Oproti Druhému městu se Prázdné ulice čtou snáze, je to taková "normálnější" próza, dá-li se to tak říct. Nemůžu ale říct, že by mě tenhle příběh o hledání pro hledání ve stylu "i cesta může být cíl" nějak výrazně zaujal, v paměti mi zůstane snad jen naprosto ujetá pasáž z večírku s operou o zhrzeném urbooceanologovi.
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Zdá se mi, že největším přínosem této knihy je pro mě rozšíření obzorů a slovní zásoby. Kapitán Bustrofedon v této souvislosti asi vede.
Musím říct, že se mi v Prázdných ulicích orientovalo mnohem lépe než v Druhém městě. Mělo to nějaký náznak příběhu a linka s mizícím inkoustem mě hodně chytla.
Každopádně jazykově vymazlené dílko. -
Nie je to kniha na jedno prečítanie, potrebuje svoj čas. Tvorí ju mnoho rozrozprávaných príbehov, v ktorých je filozofia, dejiny, grécka mytológia, symbolika, rozprávanie o hudbe, záhada sa každým príbehom nabaľuje na záhadu...
V jednej scéne hlavnému hrdinovi rozpráva maliar ako mu pred pár rokmi vo francúzskej krčmičke vyrozprával istý muž v plášti, čo zase jemu porozprávali ďalší ľudia. Toto cestovanie v čase dozadu a priberanie spätných informácii sa mi páčilo. Vrátiť sa od toľkého "rozprávania" aj s postupne nazbieranými poznatkami späť k hlavnému hrdinovi a nestratiť sa pritom v deji, bolo priam výzvou. A to celé sa stalo niekoľko krát. Od tejto knihy som si musela čas od času oddýchnuť, utriediť si myšlienky.
Súčasťou deja je aj poviedka Ženy z papíru – tá bola skvelá!
Pasáž o Čj a jeho hudbe a zvukoch bola zvláštna a išla trochu mimo mňa ale keďže slúžila k zisťovaniu a pátraniu, prečítala som.
Krásy Ajvazovho písania: detektívne prvky, symbolika, podrobné opisy zdanlivo bežných činností ako sú napr. cesta vlakom, čakanie na stanici, to, akými očami sa pozerá na mesto, ulice, kráčanie, ako sa hrá s perspektívou, so svetlom..... v knihe je mnoho krásnych viet, tu jedna z nich: „I tento svět měl své ostrůvky světla, ale ta světla na rozdíl od světel na hlavních třídách neubližovala a nevtírala se, byla to jen hrst barevných drahokamů, které přívětivý bůh městských okrajů rozsypal na hebký tmavý samet jako dar pro osamělé pozdní chodce.“ -
My second book from Ajvaz was even more complex than the first one. While Tyrkysový orel (Turquoise Eagle) was "just" a story inside a story inside a story... on 160 pages, Prázdné ulice (Empty Streets) are incredibly many serial as well as parallel stories, this time on 530 pages. The imagination of Ajvaz is amazing and I loved to read all the stories, no matter how much they were important for the main plot. The only thing I missed was any difference in style among all the stories told by so many different characters. I admit that this my demand could be caused by my recent reading of David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas where every story is in completely different genre and style. This is however what I've lacked in Prázdné ulice and why I don't rate it better.
PS: I put it into fantasy category but it's actually more magic realism. -
A twisty and turn-y read but it goes at a steady pace and I never lost interest. Really interesting book for someone more into storytelling versus plot.
