I, City

by Pavel Brycz, Joshua Cohen (Translator), Markéta Hofmeisterová (Translator)

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, 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 Kiš, or Isaac Babel.

Genres: Literature, Fiction, Poetry, Czech Literature

156 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1998

Reviews

[S̶e̶a̶n̶]

I find the idea of a city as narrator intriguing, but I only made it about halfway through this. I have no criticism about the writing or the structure—it simply didn't resonate with me and there are too many other books waiting.

[El · Rating 5 out of 5]

This collection of vignettes (or prose-poems, or whatever the kids are calling them these days) is told from the point of view of Most, a city of the Czech Republic. Most tells the images it is familiar with, from the Soviet occupation to the happenings of the Pope to a mistake during a funeral. Each image is lovingly detailed, and while each "appearance", as the author calls them, does not last more than a small handful of pages, the city-as-narrator makes the reader feel as if this is one's own city, that one is part of Most's melting pot, a Bohemian, a Gypsy, a German, maybe a Jew.

One of the best books I've read in a while that made my heart do an unexpected little flitter or two throughout. It reminded me a lot of Stephen Dobyns' Pallbearers Envying the One Who Rides - his Everyman-character was Heart who once wished he was different parts of the anatomy so long as they had a partner, unlike the heart which stands alone. Most is a city of its own with a history of being destroyed (ostensibly for the greater good) by its own inhabitants. Brycz does a wonderful job at portraying this in the heart of Most.

[rosie · Rating 5 out of 5]

my brother is engrossed with folklore, so is most of my family. my gran nailed green man faces on trees to keep the bad spirits out. but there’s this idea in celt folklore that my brother always mentions, that the land grips onto memories and ghosts are simply these memories being played out. in this sense, i, city is a ghost story. the czech republic is haunted by ghosts, its soviet/nazi past, countless occupations and yet, the memories of its people echo and ripple tenaciously. The city of Most, which also means ‘bridge’ in Czech is a connector between the land of the living and the dead. brycz pulls us in and never lets go; the city watches us with a sad and curious fascination. even after the book finishes, I still feel like I’ve been sucked into its broken homes and communities. each word is like water, flowing from one poetic elegy to the next. I need to read it again and again and again, once is not enough!

[Kristin · Rating 4 out of 5]

More poetry than prose. Beautiful, in a sort of haunting, timeless way. Definitely not an airplane book though. I could only read so many chapters in a sitting, before I needed to set it down. It also felt like it needed a bit of digesting, sometimes I would re-read a chapter, immediately after finishing it. That's not necessarily a good or bad thing, it just was.

[Laurie Keech · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fabulous beautiful tender and human, creative witty and touching. Wish I could read it in Czech!! Writing my essay on it, extremely excited and inspired

[Monica Carter · Rating 5 out of 5]

To Czechoslovakia we have gone and now we read the haunting and touching vignettes of Pavel Brycz's, I, City. Brycz's city is Most, Czechoslovakia, the city that narrates this homage itself, to what it is and once was. There is a definite history that frames the context of this novel in fragments; the history of the Northern Czech Bohemian city of Most is a city destroyed and the success of its rebirth is inconclusive. Containing a type of coal. the landscape of Most was eviscerated to mine the coal buried beneath the city. Only two buildings remain for the 1500's and even they were carefully moved to another part of the city in the 1960s. What's left is a pastiche of cheap buildings and medieval architecture that can barely survive in this depressed facade of a metropolis.

Brycz gives us brief stories of Most's inhabitants as if he floats above the city holding a pair of binoculars and focuses on whatever catches his eye from below. Most is a narrator that is beautiful, contemporary, intelligent, almost omniscient. The device of using a city as narrator feels to the reader as if reading third person, but it's written in first person. Most becomes a wistful elder, giving us tiny sketches of times and people we never knew, will never know. And like many older people, Most relies on the the ebb and flow of storytelling and how the use of humor and drama reinforce each other. We see Brycz's soft touch in the following passage an appearance, linguistic:

Most is also Prague, Paris, Babylon, but linguistically speaking. As people came to metropolises from all over the place, a tangle of languages arose. It's not any different in Most.

After all, nearly all Mosters have their ways here from other places, and by now their language has become an industrial conglomerate. Form the older residents you can still hear the influence of hard Sudeten German. And so the Czech of my citizens doesn't sing like the speech of Hradecers, Budejovicers, Brnoers or Breclavers.

Hearing the talk of a Moster, you can most often mistake him for a Praguer.

Yet it is possible to sing even in the Czech of Most. It is, however, a song of a burnt tongue, of a burnt land, and so all the more convincing.

Everyone who care for it has a soul, though short of breath from the everlasting smog and distressed by the great expanses of concrete apartment blocks--yet a soul. And only a soul gives words meaning and joy to speech.

Believe me, though, I am only a city, I don't want my heart's people to be mute.

I want to be their lost child on the boulevard of the Champs Elysees, who they take under their wing and lead home.

As part philosopher, part poet, and part parent, Most is a valiant character in a story of urban abuse and ravage. There are stories of runaways, drug addicts, love, death, remorse and innocence. We see the lives of people through the eyes of the city that protects them and has been harmed by them. These vignettes are not linear--they are more like prose poems crafted from observation and reflection as in the this excerpt about the life a sporting hall and how much happens there:

Who wouldn't be enchanted by this strange world from the other side? When coming through the artists' entrance and you sense the crowd as a rhythmic quiver, the entire expanse of the sporting hall is for you at that moment rhythm materialized, thrusting into you like a small tattooing needle. You mustn't move fitfully, you mustn't violate the rhythm; you have to be in synch with it to keep the pained tears from your cheeks. And if you succeed? It's like an orgasm touching eternity. Though it lasts only a short while, it can reproduce you to the infinitude of being.

Although it may seem that because this is not a novel presented in traditional terms, the story of the city itself is told through the characters. Czechoslovakia is known for Prague, so rich in musical and architectural history. But there is a history that is not as glamorous, not as giving. There are the gypsies and the coal mines, the Soviet Occupation and the housing projects filled with the unemployed and alcoholism. All these histories have what most histories have--tragedy and triumph. Regardless of the state of Most, Brycz gives us the sorrowful moments in life and the moments of sweetness that everyone knows. All it takes is for the city to shine it's light on you to realize that there is always a story to tell.

By the way, Twisted Spoon Press is a mighty impressive publisher and deserve high regard for choosing this book along with getting a fluid translation.

[Lysergius · Rating 4 out of 5]

A series of vignettes, interspersed with poems, and observations about life in the semi-mythical town of Most in Bohemia. Characters, situations, fantasies pass in an uninterrupted stream past the reader consciousness, the net result being a network of connections and nodes which give an aggregate picture of Most.

The author concludes that the best thing to do with the city would be to submerge it under an artificial lake, and return it to its beginnings, thereby providing a fine view for the recently reconstructed castle. Hmm...

[Malcolm · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm not really sure what to make of this book. It's apparent influences manifold – and leaving aside such obvious Central European links as those to Danilo Kis – I'm tempted to read it through a lens provided by Joyce (The Dubliners) and Calvino (Invisible Cities). As a tale of a city it is depressing but suited to Most – a grim, post-industial and mining city near the Czech-German border – that does not deal with the city as a whole but with the 70000 individual lives that make it what it is and in doing so presents that city-as-a-whole. Sure, people appear but although most are active in their stories, they appear faded against the city itself that is both narrator and subject, object and vocalist of its own experience. I wonder if it is a book of short stories, a single novel of chapters connected only by their setting, a prose poem or poems – or maybe it is all and more. Whatever its formal characteristics, it is as if I have just read a novel that enacts the fabulous essay in de Certeau's Practice of Everyday Life where the inhabitants of the city live their lives, walk their city, and leave close to independent trails that mark lives that seldom connect. Quite fabulous – and a book that deserves to sit alongside Joyce and Calvino as one of the great novels of a city.

[Joseph Schreiber · Rating 5 out of 5]

It could be argued that the celebrated cities of the world - Rome, Paris, Vienna and others - owe their mystique to words of the poets who have walked their streets. But what of the humble, disregarded metropolises, where are their voices to be found? For Czech writer Pavel Brycz, his own love/hate relationship with the city in which he grew up inspired him to wonder how he might access the beating heart of a place more associated with crime and unemployment than romance. He decided to give the voice to the city itself, allow the city to express its affection for the souls residing within its boundaries, and the result, I City, is a work of melancholy tenderness.

For my full review, please see: http://wp.me/p4GDHM-m6

[Ichor · Rating 5 out of 5]

I, City comprises a series of prose poems which form disparate parts of a novella told from the point of view of the city of Most in the Czech Republic. I'm sure it would be interesting to hear most cities tell their own story but Most's autobiography is particularly interesting because its history is marked by repeated self-destruction and recreation at the hand of its own citizens. The most recent reinvention came in the 1960s when the entire city was levelled and rebuilt somewhere else so that mines could be worked under Old Most. This is the first time Brycz has been translated into English and Twisted Spoon Press's beautiful edition comes with a helpful short (non-fiction) history of Most, which is as interesting as the work itself.

[lyell bark · Rating 4 out of 5]

nice lil' book of vingettes/short stories/prose poems/whatever you want ot call them i don't care set in most, which sounds almost as depressing a place as barstow. pretty good i'm going to read it again because it's so short. god and st. vitus bless you twisted spoon press. i liked the one about the circus and also the guy who was 99 years old an dwanted to go to war. good job brycz.

also be sure to read the translator's note first so you get some nice local history and context for what's going on. imho it should be an "introduction" at the beginning, probably.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

A somewhat fictionalised version of the Czech city, Most, reveals its history and character in short narrations. This poetic, mysterious book superbly anatomises a location which has borne the brunt of toxic political and industrial use, and summons a gallery of diverse and eccentric witnesses to assist in its autobiographical declarations. The publisher, Twisted Spoon, is a superb house, each one of whose beautifully-produced books deserves shelf-space in any reader's home.

[cherry · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am a city. I'm full of people. 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, the Medusa jellyfish. They thought up money and they eternally lack it.
They explained their dreams and then they took sleeping pills.
It's hard to survive, I, city of Most, know that.

[Stephen · Rating 4 out of 5]

A beautiful collection of narratives from the point of view of town, itself. Home to miners, the town was relocated in order to dig underneath, and the town speaks from the dusty memories and its inhabitants footsteps. Poetic, wonderful nostalgia for anyone with the small industry town sensibility.

[stephanie · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an interesting book made up of small vignettes told through the point of view of the city Most in the Czech Republic. The book spans history and the many political changes of the region alerting the reader to the rich past of Czech Republic.

[Jake Cooper · Rating 2 out of 5]

The translators' post-script is a lovely few pages on the history of Czech -- war, occupation, industrialization -- that contextualizes Brycz's tone. Wish I'd read that first, because the book's montage of images seemed lost to me, floating, disconnected.

[KristenR · Rating 3 out of 5]

The glimpses that Brycz has given us into his city of Most, while beautifully written, left me feeling sad.

[elderfoil...the whatever champion · Rating 2 out of 5]

Man, I was all about the general content and structure. I wanted to love this book...but...