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City of Torment
City of Torment is, on one level, a family and generational novel, conveyed through the complex voice of a first-person female narrator whose subjectivity becomes elaborately intertwined with the main protagonist, Eliška Beránková (Lamb). Eliška/Daniela is searching above all for her dead father, but also for her dead mother and ultimately for herself. At the same time, on a more abstract level, Hodrová introduces a feminine structural dimension to a theme especially prevalent in 20th-century prose – the novel as a self-conscious genre, openly exploring the relationship of the author to her text. Hodrová’s trilogy represents a distinct contemporary Czech voice in women’s experimental writing, a genre first introduced to anglophone readers by Virginia Woolf.
588 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1999
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Daniela Hodrová
30 books17 followersDaniela Hodrová was a Czech writer and literary scholar.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
September 2, 2024
Even at dusk the merry-go-round at the foot of the Church of the Most Sacred Heart of Our Lord keeps turning. It stands between the booth where they sell candyfloss and the old Czech shooting gallery. When a shooter hits the target, the figures miraculously come to life, My novel too, it seems to me, is such a merry-go-round and shooting gallery. The characters in it arise from the dark, disappearing and reappearing at regular intervals, they're motionless and come to life the moment I touch them in the centre of their backs, as in the game of statues, which they play in the courtyard of an old block of flats that to this day stands among the new buildings on Comenius Square. Here I touch them on paper, and they assume bodies, make a few gestures, perform in the novel their ephemeral dance, like Punch on the bottom of the bath. From time to time some other character gets on the merry-go-round, enters the novel, while another gets off and disappears into the darkness among the booths. Even when some of them disappear, there are always more riding on the merry-go-round, it looks as if they cannot leave it. And for the enchanted riders, of whom there are more and more, this fictional merry-go-round is growing very crowded.
City of Torment is the translation by Véronique Firkusny and Elena Sokol of a trilogy of novels (translated as In Both Kinds, Puppets and Theta) by Czech author Daniela Hodrová.
Jantar Publishing are responsible for bringing this into English, a small independent publisher of translated European literary fiction, jantár being the Czech/Slovak for ‘amber’:
And thanks is indeed due to them as this is an impressive work, one first bought to my attention by one of the finest reviewers of translated fiction into English, Declan O’Driscoll writing in the Irish Times who hailed the book “one of the best novels I have ever read.”
The first of the three novels, Of Both Kinds (a reference, inter alia, to the beliefs of Jan Hus around Holy Communion) sets the tone for the rest. What starts as a intergenerational tale, of an auto-fictional nature, of a Prague family, quickly becomes something more. It begins:
Alice Davidovic would have never thought the window of her childhood room hung so low above the Olšany cemetery that a body could travel the distance in less than two seconds.
Alice, a young woman, is the novel’s focal point and her family flat, above Prague’s largest and most famous cemetery, based on the authors own childhood home. And depending on the interpretation of what followed, she was either taking flight in search of her beloved (the author cites Garcia Marquez as a key influence and considers her work close to magic realism) or committed suicide to avoid being transported to the concentration camps.
This is a novelistic world where the live and the dead exist contemperaneously and indeed one where objects can also be characters:
How naïve, dear Divis Paskal, to assume there exists a basic difference between a human being and an object, between the living and the dead, between a person and the world. One slips into the other very smoothly, and the moment and point of transition are imperceptible. Where, for example, is the boundary between the conch shell within and the world without that coils up and spirals back onto itself like a shell, as Teilhard de Chardin asserts? One has only to put one's ear to a seashell lying on some pantry shelf to hear the roar of the world. And in the same place where Divis is listening to the world through the shell, Vojtech only yesterday put his ear to Marenka Tunka's belly, seeming to hear the roaring sounds of his numerous descendants and of the descendants of their descendants.
And the whole is rich with references to Czech history, both legendary and more recent events such as the Prague Spring, and literature.
[This first novel is also a reworking of an earlier translation by Tatiana and Véronique Firkusny (Tatiana her mother), published under a different title. This and the fact this is technically three novels may well render this ineligible for literary prizes such as the International Booker]
The second novel, Puppets, was a variation on the first, with a different setting in Prague, different recurrent motifs, and a different authorial stand-in as protagonist, but with certain characters recurring (and some getting confused between the different stories).
The third novel, Theta, truly elevates the work, taking an explicitly meta-fictional turn, with the author herself commenting on the novel and the basis, historical, autobiographical or purely fictional, for the characters and their stories.
So why not 5 stars? Largely as I didn’t feel fully able to appreciate the work.
Firstly, my enjoyment of the novel was much enhanced when I was familiar with the historical (e.g. the assassination of Heydrich) or literary (e.g. the ending of Kafka’s The Trial) references, which made me realise how much likely passed me by elsewhere. There is a helpful list of key figures at the end, but having to look up references with which one is unfamiliar rather detracts from the literary effect desired.
Secondly, and this is more personal taste, I am not a massive fan of long novels (where for me long is > 200 pages) particularly those with a complicated cast of characters. A character list, similar to the aforementioned list of real-life figures, would have enhanced my enjoyment. And it might have been advisable for me to have taken a break between each of the three constituent novels.
Towards the third novel’s end even the author/narrator admits:
The longer the manuscript grows, the more for me does the larger part of it irretrievably disappear, vanish into non-memory. Before beginning to write the next part, I would always have to reread the whole text from the beginning, da capo, in order to know where I am and where I must go next. I carry the novel, the novel's shadow, on my back like a half-dead animal, from time to time it jerks to and fro, sinks a claw into my back.
However a highly impressive piece of translated literature.
There is an excellent review from Joseph Schreiber at the Rough Ghosts blog here: https://roughghosts.com/2022/07/12/at...
City of Torment is the translation by Véronique Firkusny and Elena Sokol of a trilogy of novels (translated as In Both Kinds, Puppets and Theta) by Czech author Daniela Hodrová.
Jantar Publishing are responsible for bringing this into English, a small independent publisher of translated European literary fiction, jantár being the Czech/Slovak for ‘amber’:
Founded in 2011 by Michael Tate and a group of his friends, Jantar’s guiding principle was to select, publish and make accessible previously inaccessible works of Central European Literary Fiction through translations into English … texts ‘trapped in amber’.
And thanks is indeed due to them as this is an impressive work, one first bought to my attention by one of the finest reviewers of translated fiction into English, Declan O’Driscoll writing in the Irish Times who hailed the book “one of the best novels I have ever read.”
The first of the three novels, Of Both Kinds (a reference, inter alia, to the beliefs of Jan Hus around Holy Communion) sets the tone for the rest. What starts as a intergenerational tale, of an auto-fictional nature, of a Prague family, quickly becomes something more. It begins:
Alice Davidovic would have never thought the window of her childhood room hung so low above the Olšany cemetery that a body could travel the distance in less than two seconds.
Alice, a young woman, is the novel’s focal point and her family flat, above Prague’s largest and most famous cemetery, based on the authors own childhood home. And depending on the interpretation of what followed, she was either taking flight in search of her beloved (the author cites Garcia Marquez as a key influence and considers her work close to magic realism) or committed suicide to avoid being transported to the concentration camps.
This is a novelistic world where the live and the dead exist contemperaneously and indeed one where objects can also be characters:
How naïve, dear Divis Paskal, to assume there exists a basic difference between a human being and an object, between the living and the dead, between a person and the world. One slips into the other very smoothly, and the moment and point of transition are imperceptible. Where, for example, is the boundary between the conch shell within and the world without that coils up and spirals back onto itself like a shell, as Teilhard de Chardin asserts? One has only to put one's ear to a seashell lying on some pantry shelf to hear the roar of the world. And in the same place where Divis is listening to the world through the shell, Vojtech only yesterday put his ear to Marenka Tunka's belly, seeming to hear the roaring sounds of his numerous descendants and of the descendants of their descendants.
And the whole is rich with references to Czech history, both legendary and more recent events such as the Prague Spring, and literature.
[This first novel is also a reworking of an earlier translation by Tatiana and Véronique Firkusny (Tatiana her mother), published under a different title. This and the fact this is technically three novels may well render this ineligible for literary prizes such as the International Booker]
The second novel, Puppets, was a variation on the first, with a different setting in Prague, different recurrent motifs, and a different authorial stand-in as protagonist, but with certain characters recurring (and some getting confused between the different stories).
The third novel, Theta, truly elevates the work, taking an explicitly meta-fictional turn, with the author herself commenting on the novel and the basis, historical, autobiographical or purely fictional, for the characters and their stories.
So why not 5 stars? Largely as I didn’t feel fully able to appreciate the work.
Firstly, my enjoyment of the novel was much enhanced when I was familiar with the historical (e.g. the assassination of Heydrich) or literary (e.g. the ending of Kafka’s The Trial) references, which made me realise how much likely passed me by elsewhere. There is a helpful list of key figures at the end, but having to look up references with which one is unfamiliar rather detracts from the literary effect desired.
Secondly, and this is more personal taste, I am not a massive fan of long novels (where for me long is > 200 pages) particularly those with a complicated cast of characters. A character list, similar to the aforementioned list of real-life figures, would have enhanced my enjoyment. And it might have been advisable for me to have taken a break between each of the three constituent novels.
Towards the third novel’s end even the author/narrator admits:
The longer the manuscript grows, the more for me does the larger part of it irretrievably disappear, vanish into non-memory. Before beginning to write the next part, I would always have to reread the whole text from the beginning, da capo, in order to know where I am and where I must go next. I carry the novel, the novel's shadow, on my back like a half-dead animal, from time to time it jerks to and fro, sinks a claw into my back.
However a highly impressive piece of translated literature.
There is an excellent review from Joseph Schreiber at the Rough Ghosts blog here: https://roughghosts.com/2022/07/12/at...
July 12, 2022
There is much to enjoy and admire about this trilogy that moves within many layers of the city of Prague, past and present, living and dead. A massive experimental undertaking that changes form from novel to novel, my initial concern is that more familiarity with the layout of Prague and its long history would have eased the sense that I was missing many of the explicit and intertextual references, especially through the lengthy middle novel, Puppets. However I loved the magical, unbound voice which becomes increasingly blurred with that of the author, the wonderful interactions between the living and the dead and those who can mediate a transitional space, and the metafictional questioning of the nature of writing, characters and the novel as a creature with a life of its own.
A longer review of this book and Hodrová's Prague, I See a City... can be found here: https://roughghosts.com/2022/07/12/at...
A longer review of this book and Hodrová's Prague, I See a City... can be found here: https://roughghosts.com/2022/07/12/at...
July 10, 2025
More knowledge of Prague's history would have added an entire new dimension to this novel (or novels, as this is comprised of 3) for me as the reader. My ignorance and therefore my frequent confusion (and bouts of tedium) cannot diminish the exceptional prose. I may reread at some point after a survey of Prague, as it really is a prerequisite.
July 15, 2024
City of Torment is a stand-out achievement in contemporary literature, a surrealist journey through a not-so-distant Prague.
The first two parts of the novel ("In both kinds" and "Puppets") broadly follow similar narrative concepts, introducing a large number of interconnected characters physically bound to a handful of locations across Prague, such as a flat, a cemetery or a courtyard. Many of them died long ago and continue to exist in an afterlife sustained by remembrance, stuck in cycles of repetition until some transcend through acts of transformation. The line between life and death is constantly blurred and rewritten, instead it is the act of forgetting that feels like the true, irreversible loss. Present, past and future converge, characters mirror each other and sometimes blend together. Everyday objects, such as a lamb muff or a handkerchief, are given immense power and transformed into relics, prized upon by all as means of salvation. The city of Prague itself becomes akin to the Asphodel Meadows in Ancient Greek eschatology, an underworld of memory that coexists with the present. Despite a nonlinear narrative and many elements borrowed from surrealist literature the reader seldom feels lost, each brief episode helping to better understand the many protagonists, their relationships and journeys.
The narrative shifts dramatically in the last third of the novel, "Theta", whereby the author takes an approach that is much more reflective, self-aware and experimental, often breaking the fourth wall, acknowledging the first two parts as published novels and playfully switching between first and third person pronouns. This mise-en-abîme provides further hints of the autobiographical elements of the first parts but does not restrict itself to a mere rationalization of the previous characters and symbols, opening up to a much larger interior world. "Theta" is at the same time more personal and intimate, but generally less narrated and accessible. And whilst it did not strike me as much as the first two it would be difficult to imagine A City of Torment without the keys it provides.
Overall, a splendid trilogy.
The first two parts of the novel ("In both kinds" and "Puppets") broadly follow similar narrative concepts, introducing a large number of interconnected characters physically bound to a handful of locations across Prague, such as a flat, a cemetery or a courtyard. Many of them died long ago and continue to exist in an afterlife sustained by remembrance, stuck in cycles of repetition until some transcend through acts of transformation. The line between life and death is constantly blurred and rewritten, instead it is the act of forgetting that feels like the true, irreversible loss. Present, past and future converge, characters mirror each other and sometimes blend together. Everyday objects, such as a lamb muff or a handkerchief, are given immense power and transformed into relics, prized upon by all as means of salvation. The city of Prague itself becomes akin to the Asphodel Meadows in Ancient Greek eschatology, an underworld of memory that coexists with the present. Despite a nonlinear narrative and many elements borrowed from surrealist literature the reader seldom feels lost, each brief episode helping to better understand the many protagonists, their relationships and journeys.
The narrative shifts dramatically in the last third of the novel, "Theta", whereby the author takes an approach that is much more reflective, self-aware and experimental, often breaking the fourth wall, acknowledging the first two parts as published novels and playfully switching between first and third person pronouns. This mise-en-abîme provides further hints of the autobiographical elements of the first parts but does not restrict itself to a mere rationalization of the previous characters and symbols, opening up to a much larger interior world. "Theta" is at the same time more personal and intimate, but generally less narrated and accessible. And whilst it did not strike me as much as the first two it would be difficult to imagine A City of Torment without the keys it provides.
Overall, a splendid trilogy.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews