Kloktat dehet

(Gargling Tar)

About the book
Original title Kloktat dehet
First published 2005
Publisher Torst, Prague
Pages 284
ISBN number 80-7215-255-6
Languages Czech, Dutch, German
Awards Book of the Year 2005
Aleida Schot Prize for the Dutch translation


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Rights sold to
The Netherlands Ambo Anthos Publishers - Amsterdam
Germany Suhrkamp Verlag - Berlin
Poland WAB Publishers - Warsaw
Hungary Kalligram - Budapest
Spain Lengua de Trapo - Madrid
Norway Bokvennen - Oslo
France Noir sur Blanc - Paris
Bulgaria Paradoks - Sofia
Italy Einaudi editore - Turin
Turkey /b> Önce Kitap - Istanbul
United Kingdom Portobello Books - London
Israel Achuzat Bayit - Tel Aviv
Romania Editura Art - Bucharest
Egypt Al Arabi - Cairo


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A few words

 After a four year break, the long awaited new novel by Jáchym Topol has been published. And what a book! Much like his internationally acclaimed novel Night Work the main character in Gargling Tar is a young boy, with the other common element being the significance of the fatal year 1968. This is where the similarities end, the only resemblance one may detect is with the grand novel Die Blechtrommel by Günther Grass.

The hero Ilja is an orphan whose small world is brutally invaded by the stirring post-war history of Czechoslovakia, giving Ilja has just one goal: to live. Whatever one can say about the book, it is, above all, about the most basic survival instinct. Unlike what some critics claim, this is certainly not a parody. This book is dark, frightening sometimes. The events of 1968, the invasion and occupation of Czechoslovakia, in the second part of the book, is however not the real theme. 1968 is merely a catalyst for Iljas life on the edge. The first part takes place in the orphanage, while the second part moves on to the limited outside world.

The best one can do is to have Topol himself characterize his book. To him it is like a computer game. In the first part one is looking and searching, trying out all kind of different doors, encountering different things. But then in the end you finally open the right door (or is it perhaps the fatal wrong one?) and all hell breaks loose. Then, in an increasingly phantasmagoric world, you have to fight and kill your way to the apocalyptic end, because that is what a computer game is all about, evading death. And like in a computer game, you wander off, take wrong turns, encounter new things that may lead to new adventures, but are not on the path that you're supposed to follow. Topol courageously lets all these potent new motives simply die out.

Gargling Tar is a book about survival by all means. It has the pace of a thundering armoured train, it rolls over you like a Tiger tank, just to leave the reader behind breathless and devastated.

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What the press says

 Information in progress

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