I, City

Fiction. Translated from the Czech by Joshua Cohen and Marketa Hofmeisterova. Winner of the Orten Prize and the State Prize for Literature in 2004. I, CITY is a story about the north Bohemian city of Most, an ancient city founded on a primeval wetland that was literally "relocated" to get to the brown coal beneath it. For Pavel Brycz, the youngest ever recipient of the Czech State Prize for Literature, Most is its varied inhabitants, and he as the city tell its own story through these inhabitants, who make their "appearances" in fleeting, ghost-like vignettes. As they 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 irony. As Brycz makes fictional people say factual things and factual people (Kafka, the pope, Gustav Husak) say fictional things, post-modernity via magical realism makes its almost requisite—though noiseless—appearance in the best easterly European tradition of Danilo Kis or Isaac Babel.