La Pleurante des rues de Prague

by Sylvie Germain

«Cette inconnue, qui donc est-elle ?
Une vision, elle-même porteuse, semeuse de visions.
Une vision avare de ses apparitions. Elle ne s'est montrée que peu de fois, et toujours très brièvement. Mais chaque fois sa présence fut extrême.
Une vision liée à un lieu, émanée des pierres d'une ville. Sa ville. - Prague. Jamais elle n'a paru ailleurs, bien que certainement elle en ait le pouvoir.
Cette femme n'a ni nom, ni âge ni visage. Peut-être en a-t-elle, mais elle les tient cachés.
Son corps est majestueux, et inquiétant. Elle est immense, une géante. Et elle boite fortement.»
Sylvie Germain.

Genres: France, Fiction, Literature, French Literature

132 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1992

About the author

Germain received a doctorate in philosophy from the Sorbonne, and taught it at the French School in Prague from 1987 to 1993.
She claimed that philosophy, 'a continuous wonder' to her, was also too 'analytical', and she switched from Descartes and Heidegger to Kafka and Dostoevsky.
She grew up in rural France, in an area steeped in mythology and folklore, and she admitted 'that the power of place had a huge effect on me but it was an unconscious one'. That her prose was 'related to the earth ... the soil, the peasants, the trees', was revealed in her first novel, The Book of Nights (1985), which won six literary awards.
The second novel, Night of Amber (1987) continued from the first, and was followed by Days of Anger (1989). Despite this three-part structure, Germain claimed that she was 'trying only to express an obsessive image and to explain it to myself. I have no pretensions to creating a mythos. Each book begins with an image or a dream and I try to express that and give it coherence.'

Reviews

[Tom · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hypnotic and hallucinatory prose poetry at its best. A giantess composed of the souls of the dead stalks through Prague leaving a whirl of memories and metaphor wrapped tightly round her like a cloak. Mesmeric.

[Kyaw Zayar Lwin · Rating 4 out of 5]

“it is not a book, but a sifting of calls and echoes. A limping text, a stuttering. A weeping of ink. Anticipation.”

[Peter · Rating 2 out of 5]

A third of this slim volume is taken up by an interview and introduction, leaving little more than a short story. Its conceit is interesting enough. The weeping woman of Prague is the exudation and distillation of the city’s grief – the pity and tears of the living and the dead – and this phantom treads its way both through the city and (in exemplary postmodernist fashion) through the pages of the book itself.

So far, so good. But the burdens borne by the weeping woman are so prosaically spelt out and so frequently iterated that the author might as well have given the wraith a loudspeaker and a fistful of placards. The other problem is that the language describing the weeping woman’s appearances, the atmosphere and the surrounding cityscape, is banal – predictably dreary and foggy and icy and desolate. I was surprised to find that the otherwise hagiographic introduction also labels the descriptions ‘banal’ – but with the modifier ‘seemingly’. This presumably means that the banality is deliberate...which is nice to know.

The Weeping Woman on the Streets of Prague is all a bit amateurish and other-worldly, as if written by a promising teenager with a fondness for black clothes. Disappointing – yet happily brief.

[Mel · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had not heard of this book or this author before but I randomly found it in the Oxfam in Crouch End and thought I'd buy it. It was utterly brilliant!!! Even though this was a translation from the French it was still one of the most beautiful books I've ever read. The language was just lovely, the images that were created were sad and haunting. The book captured all the wonderful and tragic things of life. There was no plot and no characterisation just snapshots of a mythical being walking the streets of Prague and it was perfect. I'm so glad I found this and will definitely have to try the original French. I will be keeping my eyes out for other works by this author as well.

[Manon Alliaume · Rating 5 out of 5]

Manifestation de l'invisible, de l'impalpable et de l'insaisissable. Durant ma lecture, chaque page me faisait frissonner. La plume poétique de l'autrice transfigure cette entité, cette inconnue vivante connue par tous. J'ai adoré lire ce livre, me demander qui est-elle ? Que représente-elle ? J'ai aimé voir le souvenir, la compassion et la pitié dans chaque lieu et chaque objet d'apparence banal. M'attarder sur les détails qui au final n'en sont pas puisque même ces détails nous raconte une histoire, une injustice, une quête de consolation. J'ai aimé ce livre dans son entièreté, du début jusqu'à la fin, en passant par son coeur. Et je ne peux que vous le recommander !

[Christine Biloré - Lectures cannoises · Rating 4 out of 5]

👉 Roman court assez inclassable de Sylvie Germain. Tel un conte ou une parabole, Sylvie Germain évoque en 12 chapitres les apparitions d’une mystérieuse silhouette de femme qui erre dans les rues de Prague.

Chacune de ses apparitions est liée à un événement ayant affecté la ville. Ce roman semble être un poème ou une prière pour les victimes de l’histoire. On peut y percevoir la douleur de la ville, mais c’est surtout la mémoire des disparus qui est rappelée ici.

La pleurante des rues de Prague est transmission et mémoire, elle est un rappel qu’il ne faut pas oublier le passé.

Nous suivons ses déambulations dans la ville qui est décrite avec précision, bien que tout semble recouvert d’un voile gris et flou.

💬 Il est difficile de faire un résumé ou une critique de ce livre, tout comme il m’a été très difficile d’en choisir un extrait tant chaque phrase est magnifiquement tournée. Il en ressort que j’ai très envie de le relire dans son intégralité ou de l’ouvrir au hasard pour en lire des passages.

[Missberet · Rating 3 out of 5]

Poverty is a living ghost. A tall woman with a limp haunts the narrator of the story. Sightings of this woman, whose face the narrator does not want to look at for her to remain an enigma. A spirit of the poor living and deceased, and for the living a body. A vessel moved by the mind or by the soul. We are all born into this world wearing only our soul. We come into this world naked, insulated by bone, muscle, organs, blood vessels and blood, yet the spirit cannot separate until death and we go back to where we came from or another place perhaps not so pleasant. Our actions, words everything we do and say are guided by a pen, perhaps as we write about what we are,walking on top of the paper and guided by the pen. What thoughts do we have.....are we humane or barbarians.....?.....

[Aly · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5

"Certains jours de novembre sont ainsi, - naufrageurs du visible."

Une proposition bien intrigante que cette femme sans nom, sans âge ni visage qui sillionne les rues de Prague. J'ai adoré l'écriture, l'idée derrière le roman et le début mystérieux m'a séduite, mais comme on reste tout au long du récit dans une énumération des apparitions de la dame, j'ai trouvé qu'on a vite fait le tour du sujet.

Je ressors de ma lecture tout de même contente de cette découverte.

[Romolo · Rating 5 out of 5]

An immaterial, sobbing giantess with a limp wanders through the streets of Prague, looming over buildings, walking through buildings. The observer-narrator writes down twelve of her apparations. Germain’s prose reveals/conceals a deep spirituality and magical understanding of the world. I often had goosebumps, especially in the 11th chapter. I will never forget that shoe in a puddle, and how Geain distills out of that one image a heart-wrenching soliloquy on the dead.

[Anderson Garcia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good book I love this book dude read it bfugh

Yeas
K

Anderson garcia
agreed that this boo is awesome and recommends or to the world. ThanK you precious ONE

[Flavia · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5

[Ines · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5

[Tulia Hernández · Rating 4 out of 5]

I honestly loved it… it’s very deep and the description are very interesting and very well executed..

[Malcolm · Rating 4 out of 5]

There is a giant, translucent, stooped, grey woman moving through the streets of Prague. She appears 12 times, leaving behind a sense of something special, of sadness, of having lost something or someone. With her tears she concurrently absorbs and exudes the city’s sadness, it’s people lost in and to ordinariness, summoned up with evocative (if at times overplayed) metaphor. She seems to be made up of and to absorb the dead – appearing almost at random while the narrator waits for a tram, takes a side street, crosses a bridge – or any other of the countless mundane things we do every day in whatever place we live.

It is as if she is the memory of the city, the less glamorous parts, those that haven’t made it into the official memory, into the official history, into the story of the city told by and about those who leave traces of their presence, of their having been (here). She is ghostly but invigorating, in the visible world only occasionally, but quite possibly here, just not visible, most of the time.

Sylvie Germain’s short (barely 90 pages of text) is reflective, meditative, based in philosophical musings without being a ‘philosophical novel’. It feels as if she has found Angelo Maria’s Ripellino’s Magic Prague not in the streets and mysteries of the old town as Ripellino did, but in the traces and residual auras of those who were here before. Or perhaps is it that Germain’s narrator’s father has just died and the Weeping Woman becomes a medium to mourn… either works.

Whatever the force that hails into existence the Weeping Woman, she is elemental Prague. This is book to roll around in and relish, a book of individual and collective memory, of the memories, magic and lure of place (as Lucy Lippard called place’s siren song). Invoking but not limited to Smichov and Mala Strana, surely this is Prague at its most noir. I’m not sure how well it would work if you’re a stranger to Prague (other than to know that your Prague is different to mine which is different to a Czech’s Prague or a resident’s city). Whichever Prague you encounter the Weeping Women in, take your time with her; it pays off…..

[Liam · Rating 3 out of 5]

''Sometimes the revelation of an image is enough for language suddenly to glaze over, for thought to snag. We are left untenanted, anchorless, our eyes misted over with absence, our hearts a prey to emptiness. And if death were to come to take us at such moments, it would fine no one - just a husk of a being. A husk crackled with astonishment and naked dreams''(79)

''She has withdrawn from our sight, which sees so little, which is ignorant of so many colours, forms and movements; and she has withdrawn from our hearing which is so poor, which is ignorant of so many sounds, of so much music and silence. Who senses the aura surrounding plants, trees and bodies, who seizes the infinitesimal melody which purrs around us? Even those who do sense them can do so very rarely, and very briefly''(120)

[Jessi · Rating 3 out of 5]

The imagery here is fantastic, and there are moments of true magic: an old, abandoned shoe that retains the shape of its wearer's foot, crying out its erstwhile utility, a swan that dances with all that is felt by sentient beings. The writing is at times painterly, showing off what I love about Sylvie Germain. But then I get the feeling that Germain does not trust her reader to "get it," to understand the metaphors, the big picture. This is a meditation on living, writing, and humanity, but its point is too blatant, repeatedly spelled out, in case the reader missed it (again). Nonetheless, the point is appreciated. If one can manage to wade through this, the images may be worth the effort.

[Sjonni]

Au gré de ballades dans Prague, une géante immatérielle apparait charriant dans ses hardes tous les destins de l'histoire humaine. Un conte inspiré par la splendeur de la plus belle ville du monde, théâtre malgré tout d'horreurs sans nom et métaphore du parcours brisé de l'homme. Un texte composé dans un français splendide.

[Christina · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was very weepy and abstract, and I don't think I would have liked it at all if Prague as a city was unfamiliar to me. The book has atmosphere, and maybe requires a certain quiet mind to get in to it.

[A · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a lyrical, thought provoking book filled with striking imagery and meditations on death, life and meaning. It's hard to capture its beauty in a simple review - it's only short, so a read of it is highly recommended!

[Yann · Rating 1 out of 5]

J'ai détesté.

[Lysergius · Rating 2 out of 5]

A little long winded...

[Li Vera · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved it <3