authors influenced by Pynchon

[Ya Sam]

Jachym Topol

City Sister Silver


"Despite its episodic feel, City Sister Silver isn't about plot. In essence, 
this is a story *about* telling stories, and the events of the narrative 
serve to that end. Topol, a playful mythomaniac and raconteur at heart, 
embraces the tradition of oral storytelling and the accuracy-flaws inherent 
in such babel. CSS of the East Germans," when thousands from that country 
sought asylum in Prague's West German embassy in 1989); Native American 
history-cum-legend; Old Bohemio-Celtic tribal-war tales; revisionist Greek 
mythology (a re-imagining of Odysseus and Penelope that has Homer rolling in 
his grave); mock-American tall-tales; Urban legends (a snuff film); modern 
cliche's (a prison rape); Grimms' fairy tales; a riff on a fictional comic 
book; and most unnerving, a chilling Auschwitz dream sequence, replete with 
a talking-skeleton tour guide and an endless morass of human bones. Someone 
is always telling a story in CSS, but the tales always entertain and engage; 
they never seem forced, superfluous or pretentious.

In raving about CSS to various friends, I found myself comparing Topol to a 
host of different writers, and yet, as in all great literature, this novel 
remains unique. Topol invokes everyone from fellow Czechs Bohumil Hrabal, 
Franz Kafka and Jaroslav Hasek, to others such as Celine, Pynchon, Kerouac, 
Irvine Welsh, Blaise Cendrars, and Anthony Burgess. Every reader will find 
as many different comparisons (I saw one reviewer liken the novel to the 
best of Gunther Grass and Salman Rushdie).

One caveat, which is confession by Potok, and at first punctuation seems 
arbitrary (e.g., Topol is fond of ellipses and the sentence 
fragment-as-sentence). Like Burgess's Clockwork Orange and Welsh's 
Trainspotting, it takes a good fifteen or twenty pages to get into the 
rhythm of the slang, but once you get with it, the book flows like water. 
Afterall, this is a book about the beauty and elasticity of language, and 
the tales one can spin using creative language. Finally, I should point out 
the smooth translation of this novel by Alex Zucker, who took on an 
obviously gargantuan task, and who rounded out his duties with an engaging 
translator's preface and insightful and erudite end notes."

"Although it's a difficult book to handle in its Pynchonesque, Joycean 
ambition, it rewards you with hundreds of vignettes, miniature scenes pulled 
out of reveries and terrors for our delight and instruction. A more serious 
book at its core than the punkish surface may let on, the respect for mercy, 
faith, and humanity beneath the mayhem and alienation reminds us that the 
search for enduring values persists in the most unlikely fictional and 
factual terrains. And, like Dante at his quest's end, somehow he sees and 
does not see his Beatrice again. At least that's my guess. See for yourself. 
This book marvelously conjures up images from its descriptions, and you too 
drift through space."


http://www.amazon.com/City-Sister-Silver-Jachym-Topol/dp/0945774451

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