Noční práce

(Nightwork )

About the book
Original title Noční práce
First published 2001
Publisher Torst - Hynek, Prague
Pages 259
ISBN number 80-7215-136-3
Languages Czech, Dutch, German, French, Polish, Italian, Spanish
Extra Praised highly everywhere


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Rights sold to
France Robert Laffont - Paris
The Netherlands Ambo Anthos - Amsterdam
Germany Suhrkamp - Berlin
Hungary Kalligram - Budapest
Poland WAB - Warsaw
Italy Azimut - Rome
Spain Langua de Tropo - Madrid
Norway Bokvennen - Oslo
Croatia Fraktura - Zagreb
Sweden Ersatz - Stockholm
United Kingdom Portobello Books - London
Macedonia Kingdom Tri Publishing Centre - Skopje
Slovenia Cankarjeva zalozba -Ljubljana
Serbia Dereta - Belgrade
Bulgaria Paradox - Sofia
Italy Keller editore - Rovereto


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Synopsis

Text by Misha Glenny
© Misha Glenny

This is a dense, complex novel that contains some exhilarating writing but eschews easy narrative in favour of one that becomes increasingly fragmented and surreal. This allows Topol reflections on revolution, foreign occupation and social adaptability in a distinctly more sober and less romantic fashion than is the case with his immediate local literary antecedents, Kundera, Škvorecký and Klíma. Rather than descending into magic realism (which is how some of the German reviews have described it), the novel bears stylistic comparison with Kafka, other German expressionist work, some interwar Czech writing and even at times, I thought, Flann O'Brien.

After a brief lyrical scene-setter, the action proper opens in Prague during the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968, ordered by Moscow to halt the process of liberalisation known as the Prague Spring. As Russian tanks spread through the streets of Prague, the father of 13 year-old Ondra and his younger brother Kamil (at the end of convalescing from a serious road accident) bundles his children onto a coach bound for his birthplace, a tiny village in northern Bohemia close to the Polish and German borders.

Using flashback, we learn that the father has exceptional creative gifts - he is an inventor. At some point, the Party had deemed him politically unreliable and sent him to work on the factory floor. Its interest in him is aroused again when it emerges that he has invented a machine that can predict the weather accurately. Before packing his boys off to the village, the father is seen grabbing his blueprints from Prague's patent office. We also learn that their mother was a serious alcoholic. Obsessed with an absent elder daughter (whose fate remains obscure), Eluzína, she develops a game of dressing up the younger son as a girl, introducing one of the novel's main themes, the need to deceive and dissemble in order not so much to achieve anything in life but to survive it.

So far, so straightforward. But on arrival in the village, it soon becomes clear that life for the two boys is not going to be a cosy escape from the high drama being played out in Prague. Instead, they find they have to survive in a microworld which in its peculiar fashion is every bit as unpredictable, funny and violent as is Prague. Before they can even begin to take everything in, the two boys find themselves attending their own grandfather's funeral.

The Czech capital with its highly-manicured beauty seems very far away, as do the sentimental myths about a cultured people, cruelly struck down by barbarians. Instead, we have a mountainous, forested landscape that projects the allegorical threat of German romanticism, and a rural community riven with petty suspicion and hints of something nasty in the woodshed. Perhaps the only cliché in the book concerns the pub (inevitably the centre of village life). The humour here is recognisably Švejkian (welcome light relief frankly).

The concentration on this tiny community does not mean that the external world fails to penetrate the village. On the contrary - this is borderland over which fleeing peoples, victims of genocide, armies (defeated or victorious but usually trigger-happy) regularly tramp. Their ideological messengers infiltrate society and influence the discourse of local disputes and rivalry without necessarily changing the essence of these conflicts. Representatives of the Party and the Police intrude but find themselves having to adapt to the village's social consciousness that is stained by prejudice and mythology. The shifting ideological imposition from outside can physically destroy the village (as happens when a haywire Russian tank starts firing at the pub, the inevitable centre of village life) but it cannot influence perception and attitudes.

Outsiders are not afforded much credit in the village and as the fey representatives of Prague, Ondra and Kamil, have to prove themselves, less to the elders of the village than to their rough-and-tumble peers. For Ondra, the main narrator, much of the book is a sort of literary survival guide through a world inhabited by different tribes, memories and dangers. He follows several threads (the mysterious absence of father, mother and sister; the hunt for the father's papers; his attempts to hook up again with Zuza, the landlord's daughter, after he has lost his virginity to her etc.) but their ends are never tied although we soon learn not to expect or worry about their resolution.

Gradually, the dark influence of the landscape and chaotic weather begin to close in on the characters as a number of unexplained deaths confer a still more sinister atmosphere on what is already an uneasy environment. As the novel's structure becomes more dream/nightmare like, Ondrej and his family attempt to escape both the village and the nightmarish quality of the novel by making a run across the border. Failure is not followed by defeat but by disorientation and survival with the promise of further confusion in the future.

Night Work is a very serious piece of literature which in my opinion marks a step forward in the literary traditions of Central Europe and, although bleak, it is a sober assessment of the way central Europe has survived history's vicissitudes. It is, thank God, not precious about the Czech experience and although certain myths endure, it is both exterior and interior worlds that generate the immense challenge of survival laid down by the novel.

While the writing is very good, it demands significant attention from the reader and parts are obscure for non Central Europeans. On the other hand, Topol is a young, but fast-maturing writer who is likely to become a major figure on Europe's literary scene. Always surprising and fast-paced, City, Sister, Silver is at once satirical and romantic, wild and controlled. The novel is full of storytelling, myths, dreams and nightmares, shifting through a variety of genres. It is a novel for readers who want an unforgettable reading experience.

What makes City Sister Silver so special is its language, its energy, and its ability to creatively capture the feelings that accompanied the opening up of Central and Eastern Europe in the 90s, when in Topol's words "time exploded". It is a truly breathtaking book. There is, however, a protagonist, Potok, and a love interest, whom he calls Sister. In short, this is not a realistic approach to an important historical watershed, but rather a unique, imaginative approach. As one Czech critic wrote, "City Sister Silver tells me more about the epoch than many of the books that try so hard to articulate and explain the burning ideas of the day."

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What the press says

 Trouw, 04/03/2003, Anton Verbij
In the German and English speaking countries he is already known for some time. 'The young wild man from Prague', 'the Czech Jean Genet', 'cult writer of the Generation '89', 'shooting star of Prague literature', are a few of the characterizations that fell in his lot. Jáchym Topol is received with open arms in the international world of literature.

The writer has already been compared to numerous grand authors. To Jean Genet, Allen Ginsburg, William Burroughs. This comparison refers mainly to his poetry and earlier novels.

With Working at Night he leaves the stage of literary promise behind. Topol is on its way to become a phenomenon.

De Standaard, 08/05/2003, Lieve de Boeck
A brilliant novel by Jáchym Topol

Topol shows people who are on the one hand rooted in archaic, rural and mythic tradition, but who are the other hand caught up by the brutal political reality, the invasion of the Russians. On top of these old stories humming around in this village, are emerging new myths from the near past (Germans) en the frightening present (Russians). The villagers are not always conscious of the fact of mixing up fantasy and reality and seem to cherish the cruel fairy-tale in which they live. For Ondra and the Small one it looks a lot like a frightening labyrinth without an exit en the village stands in sharp contrast to the city. That is one of Topol's themes: the stifling, collective sub consciousness of the rural country versus the alleged rationality of live in the city. The author is also fascinated by the indestructible dream of love as possible escape from the grim reality, a hopeless and moving human illusion.

Working at Night is a luminous, fascinating novel full of stories about brotherhood, cruelty, xenophobia, fear, paranoia and short-lived liberation, in short a vital book about the everlasting human shortcoming, which has been written with a same amount of cynicism as well as love.

De Financieel-Economische Tijd, 07/05/2003, Marc Holthof
The numerous preserved stories, rituals and archaic habits turn Working at Night into a bizarre book. The book is also sometimes hard to grasp, because no story is told from beginning to the end with facts. Mostly they are fragments, a linking up of preserved small pieces, exactly like the rural mythologies are spread amongst the villagers. Yet Topol's novel is trustworthy, credible. With these fragments he is able to convey the indeterminate fears in such a way his novel becomes itself a spooky story of mythic standard, with the leading part of two young children who both in a lucid a naïve style find their way in a extreme though world.

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Excerpt

Night Work

Translated from the Czech by William Hollister
© English translation William Hollister

I'll sit on the sidewalk and rest for a bit. That's what astonished them most. And what about you, sir? What would you do, with your PhD forged in Bucharest or something, if your own child were run over in front of you? You'd realise that you have still got another one and you'd sit for a moment. Allegedly drunk. Your Honour of the Court! I've got to laugh. It was in a field that I had my first delirium. At that time, my daughter swam off, just my luck. Then I wandered off, I was somewhere in the countryside. And, your Most Worshipful Excellence, imagine that all of a sudden all those church towers, scattered about that gorgeous valley, simultaneously tipped over. And they pointed directly at my heart.

And now, imagine this, Mr. Professor of all human sciences: All of those scythes, on those monuments and posters that had been put out there by the wise and firm hand of the party, began to slash at me and all those hammers pounded on my head. Such was the pounding in my skull that I felt as if I was standing in a waterfall of cracked pottery.

Magical land, my Bohemia, really is, I swear it: A combination of Catholicism and communism in a most degenerated form. Write a five page essay on that bipolarity for the next seminar, comrade ideologue. That's an order. But mainly don't forget this: What do those two worldwide ideologies say to the individual who trudges beneath that low and murky sky? They say: Guilty! Guilty of existence. Always and in all situations. Choose your own punishment. Do it now! I've got my alcohol. I have to admit that I'm a bit despondent. I'd be interested in knowing how long I've been here. So finally he succeeded, Mr. worldly! He dumped me. He'll rake in his business, grab the boys -- I mean what's left of them (I say that to brush off the heavy gloom with a healthy dose of cynicism) -- and he'll run away. Half the country is cramming towards the borders. And I'm just fine here, lying and resting very nicely oh la-la. It seems that they've strapped me down to prevent me from crushing my belly I mean what'd be residing inside. It's no wonder; its not me that's important, but perhaps some small soldier or tiny prostitute will tumble out of me. That'd do them good.

Yeah, well, so I couldn't do it. Never mind the cops, I know I'm going to face another court that's the court that has sat without break since the very first instant, from the very first cell, from the dawn of the Earth. Bottle after bottle has drunk up my brain. But its not too late. Five minutes to twelve isn't noon, dear Jury. I will make it out of here. This is no Soviet mad house, this here is a serious Central European Facility for pregnant murderously alcoholic women, damned it. I'm going to crawl to them on all fours. To my kids. Naturally, like a she-wolf in a way.

Mr. Investigator! An alcoholic, a night owl, would like only a few moments of peace and quiet after a busy day. It's what they call an oceanic feeling. Few know about it. And the fact is that every day is bustling and busy, particularly in this shore-less land. We all know that, don't we, dear Bread-Roll and Dumpling, dear Pepik and Lojzik, dear neighbors?

I'd like another life, Mr. Scientist told me. You're the father of my kids, so cut it with that kind of chatter. He moved out. That maker of world history. He's the father of my children and as soon as my fortieth creeps up on me like an octopus, the great lord lifts him up and he strays off to devote himself to his work. Yeah, well that's just wonderful. Is that what's done? That's precisely what is done. Waiter, another one. Now!

When my son came to me and sat on the sidewalk, he said: Mummy. He was trembling from head to toe, but some kind of energy charging through him warmed me up. They're going to put them up in that country dump again. Most likely he wants to emigrate, since his work with the comrades didn't work out. 'I'll sell it to the army,' he says. What planet do you live on? The army steals what it requires.

Yeah, yeah. On top of all that, there are some airplanes flying over Prague. Wouldn't I be lucky if they were bombers. More likely they're stuffed with some goggle-eyed Siberians who'd get so flipped out that they'd stumble over their Kalashnikovs. If we were good for anything, then they'd be tripping over their own guts. Czechs. Tricolors: They're everywhere. National pride. Jesus!

If I were at least a driblet sane, and unshackled of course, I'd crawl under my bed out of shame. Or maybe out of fear. Is that done? To leave a defenseless woman to face an attack by a missile division? Hey, morons, is there anybody here?

Nah, they won't be bombardiers. We'd have heard rumbling. If an atomic bomb were to explode over Prague right now, my heart would burst with joy. When I was little, I saw Dresden burn. From the window of our Prague home. I could see the fire's light in the sky. I will never forget that. And now I am going to pray for a small miracle. To wake up, to have those straps loosened and the door opened. Maybe that will happen

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