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Pavel Brycz: Jsem Město (I, City)

The narrator of this novel is not a person but, as a the title states, a city. The city is the author’s hometown of Most. (Most is the Czech for bridge.)

Our narrator has no pretensions. He is willing to admit that he is not Rome or the Vatican. While he does to a certain extent get into the history of the town much of it is what might be describesa series of snapshots of various aspects of the city. This can include various people doing various things, some good,and some less so and some neither one nor the other. He describese vents, but can also describe the buildings of his city. Most of the people we meet are either fictitious or, at least as far as we are concerned anonymous. However, we do meet some famous people. Some will only be known in the country and not by foreigners but others worldwide. For example Pope John XXII writes to them and tell them not to be so Hussite and returned to Catholicism. We also have a brief reference to Formula One racing and meet many other famous Formula One racing drivers of the period. However, there is no question that the fictitious./anonymous stories are the most interesting. . Nothing human is strange to me. I love people. But not because they are great.I love them because they are small.There are a lot of them, and they’re all lonesome. Fettered, they yearn for freedom. They pray for immortality, and yet they don’t survive the touch of death.

Though much of it essentially appears towards the end of the book the history is interesting, primarily because the communists found in the 1960s that the old town was sitting on a lignite coal field and they moved the whole town away so that they could dig up the lignite. When I say.moved in fact, only the church was moved. The rest was destroyed and rebuilt on the new site.

He commentsI am a city, a new city. I cannot bear witness to the past,” for how can a city bear witness to a life predating its very existence, a life it was in many ways created to destroy? Most has some other interesting history. Up to World War II. There was a majority of German speakers and Most was part of Sudetenland, the part coveted it and then seized by the Nazis. After the war., the German speakers were expelled to Germany and now those people in the city speak Czech. But he accepts that Most is declining, has been doing so for sometime and is continuing to do so.

So we have a range of fascinating and original stories but also history, social and political commentary,, prose poems of views of the city from various aspects and the whole range more accounts made by a man who is from the city and is writing out of the city. Because he mixes it all up, it works very well as we jump from one to the other and make for fascinating reading.

He is, as he says particularly interested in people and we get a lot of stories of interesting people

We also learn about the culture such as poet and artists though he comments Dear people, while you’re painting away here without a care in the world we’re being occupied.

He gets into religious issues as well commenting on the church that was
moved that it was Catholic and therefore essentially foreign to their culture. But of course the city had a Jewish population and they get mentioned as well. There is a particularly interesting story of a young man.Aaron, who goes drinking and meets the Tsar. They get on well. Later he will join Tsar’s army and the Tsar is so impressed with him that he offers to make him Commander in Chief. Of course he will have to convert to Christianity. Initially he seems happy to do this but then has his doubts.

He is not the only young man who meets a political leader and comes out well.. Gstáv Husák, the then president comes to town and gives a speech,a six-hundred-and-thirteen-page speech, . He inadvertently blows his nose on Till’s scarf. He is apologetic. This does not stop our narrator from mocking the president.

There are lots of other fascinating stories. Though I am a city, I’m not interested in the tabloids.I’m interested in a story. And what really happened . For example, there is a man whose wife is serially unfaithful but she is murdered by one of her lovers. He takes the blame, which is, more or less, explained.

One interesting story concerns polar bears not what you would expect to find in Most. Polar bears are apparently untameable but this family goes to the circus and sees that a woman has managed to tame them. They are so impressed they want to ask her how she does it. More particularly it seems at her techniques can be applied to a wife taming her husband.

The polar bears are not the only animals featured as apparently the children are very fond of a local donkey who eats tobacco.

This book works well because of the fascinating kaleidoscope view of the city ofMost. One minute we have a historical fact and then a prose poem about some aspect of the city followed by a decidedly odd story about the people who lived there and who visit it

Brycz obviously he loves his city but also, obviously sees its faults and foibles and is not afraid to mention them.

Publishing history

First published in 1998 by Nakladatelstvi
First published in English in 2012 by Twisted Spoon Press
Translated Joshua Cohen and Markéta Hofmeisterová