authors influenced by Pynchon

[David Morris]

This book sure has a nice cover.  It sounds great from the review
below.  Has anybody here actually read it?

On 10/16/06, Ya Sam <takoitov at hotmail.com> wrote:
> 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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-- 
David Morris