"City Sister Silver is a first novel the way The Tin Drum and
Midnight's Children were first novels —
a prodigal astonishment; an emancipation proclamation."
—John Leonard, Newsday
"Topol's book is a fervent effort by a post-Cold War writer to break
away from the familiar dissident mode of his seniors and to stake out
the fresh troubles that freedom —and, more to the point, a raw market
economy have spawned since the Velvet Revolution."
—Patricia Hampl, Los Angeles Times Book Review
"Readers embarking on City Sister Silver are in for an exhilarating,
exasperating journey ... kaleidoscopic and ethereal, full of motion
for its own sake, with many memorable stops along the route."
—Neil Bermel, New York Times Book Review
"Topol's phantasmagoric odyssey through a racketeering, polyglot,
cultural stew of post-Soviet Bohemia has been acclaimed as the definitive novel
of a Czech new wave. Catbird Press does great service to bring it to anglophone readers."
—Choice
Jáchym Topol was famous in his youth as an underground poet and songwriter. He became even more famous for writing the book that has most successfully and imaginatively captured the dislocation brought about by the fall of communism: City Sister Silver.
Winner of the Egon Hostovský Prize as the best Czech book of the year, City Sister Silver is also the only novel of the 1990s included on a list of the hundred greatest Czech prose works (from a survey of Czech writers and critics done by the newspaper Týden ("Week"); it came in #26).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. It is a truly breathtaking book. 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."
See the review excerpts and excerpts from the book itself to get a more concrete idea of what City Sister Silver is all about.
$19.95 paper, $40 cloth, $10 e-book. 512 pages, ISBN 0-945774-45-1, 43-5.
An e-book of City Sister Silver can now be purchased directly from Catbird Press in PDF, EPub, or MOBI (Kindle) formats for $10.
Payment is via Pay Pal (our Pay Pal e-mail address is catbird@pipeline.com). Include a note in your payment, such as
"Please send a (format name) of City Sister Silver to (your e-mail address)" or send a separate e-mail to info@catbirdpress.com,
which we can respond to with the e-book attached.
To read the first chapter of City Sister Silver, click here.
To see how City Sister Silver has been received by Americans, Czechs, and Germans, see below.
Alex Zucker lived in Prague for several years, translating and copy editing. He has translated several literary works from Czech into English, including Topol's novel The Devil's Workshop and his novella Trip to the Train Station. In 2010, he won the American Literary Translators Association's National Translation Award for his translation of Petra Hůlová's novel All This Belongs to Me. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
The editor and translator of this book have, with the author's approval, deleted portions from the Czech edition of this book, totaling about 20 pages, for a variety of reasons. If you would like to read the entire novel as it originally appeared in Czech, you can read, download, or print out the deleted text by clicking here.
What People Have Been Saying About
Jáchym Topol's Novel City Sister Silver
A masterpiece of postcommunist Czech fiction.
—Talk magazine (included in April Talk 10)
Like all grand epics, Jáchym Topol's City Sister Silver ... demands to be read multiple times, so dense is it with allusion, metaphor and complexities of plot.
—Sudip Bose, Washington Post Book World
City Sister Silver is nothing short of brilliant. Topol's language is dense and apocalyptic, but his influences and intellectual fetishes (Vonnegut, Burroughs, Native American lore) should connect with American readers.
—Richard Byrne, St. Louis Magazine
Like most newly free societies, City Sister Silver is at once violent, confused, and limitless in possibility – and like most revolutions, it is nearly impossible to quit once begun.
—Peter Ritter, Rain Taxi
In pointillist, elliptical prose, Topol aptly captures the period's social dislocation, and the hallucinatory quality of even everyday experiences ... It achieves a level of horrific lyricism reminiscent of the ravings of a minor, denunciatory Old Testament prophet. ... the narrative acquires the power of truth transmitted through sharp-honed fantasy and resonant vision.
—Publishers Weekly
Topol is already being hailed as the supernova of post-1989 Czech fiction . . . and Zucker has emerged as a leader of what Daylight in Nightclub Inferno calls "the new generation," already ranking among the established translators.
—Randall Lyman, San Francisco Bay Guardian
City Sister Silver marks a turning point in Czech prose, the point when literary development must finally break away and, after all the fatiguing twists and turns and subtle departures, strike out in a definite direction. . . . the novel incorporates the tremendous hum of life and raw materials that has piled up with time, and does so with verve and with bold artistic stylization. . . . Topol's novel is a cross between a picaresque novel about the wanderings of Potok, the hounded narrator, and a breakneck-paced thriller complete with agents, spies, dead bodies, and mafiosi. . . . Weaving through the story is the motif of love. The amorous tension is evident from the first sentences, and following how that yearning escalates, emerging and working its way into clarity, is one of the greatest experiences of reading this book.
—Jiri Penás in Mladá fronta dnes
City Sister Silver is a vibrantly fresh work, an epic novel that can be described as 'post-reality grotesque.' Time itself has exploded, fragmenting reality into a myriad shreds. In reconstituting this atomized world, the author ignores conventional boundaries to summon up all the diverse powers of language. Dreams, picaresque adventures, hallucinations, myths, memories, news events interweave to conjure up the young hero's frightening—yet also comic and exhilarating—pilgrimage through the inferno of recent history. Alex Zucker's energetic English preserves most of the author's linguistic inventiveness and idiosyncratic verve.
—Peter Kussi, translator and professor of Czech literature
In City Sister Silver, experience and imagination mix in a way that brings a new vitality to Eastern European literature. Its detailed view of reality does not lead to a political or moral indictment of the way things are or of those who fell from power. Instead, he has created an alternative world, an aesthetic space.
—Gregor Ziolkowski, Berliner Zeitung
A magnificent spewing of everything, a spewing that leads to thoughts of Kerouac, Genet, and Dante. ... 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.
—Sergej Machonin (Czech critic)
City Sister Silver is impossible to grasp using the usual clichés of criticism. The prose is wide-ranging and intricate, artistically ambitious and nonconformist. . . . City Sister Silver offers an opportunity to examine both our language and the values of our society.
—Antonín Alenka in Literární noviny
City Sister Silver is a one-of-a-kind response to the debate on whether and how it is possible to portray present-day reality in literature and art. It is ominously prophetic, one might say scandalous, and last but not least it is a good-natured spit into the somewhat cold soup of contemporary Czech prose. . . . Underneath all of the cynicism, savagery, and rapaciousness, the chaos of gruesome scenes and macho talk, one senses something else, perhaps futile these days, but for which it is worth striving even with the awareness that it is a losing battle: an almost archetypal sense of honor, goodness, and friendship. That is what makes City Sister Silver also a great novel about love, and some of the passages on this theme rank among the most penetrating and poetic ever written in Czech literature.
—Jan Gabriel, Literární noviny
City Sister Silver is volcanic: Topol's imagination suddenly rips out from under the earth with eruptive force, then cools off in the later pages, giving the reader a chance to relax. The book's most captivating sections, delivered with spontaneous energy and confidence, are actually the digressions — poems in prose, near-mystical visions — while the text of the main story line is constructed in a highly refined manner, a textbook example of literature. The author works with elements of both archaic and modern myths, plus ancient symbols, the established themes of the thriller, the comedy, and the horror, and also erotic literature and boys' adventure books.
—Viktor Lajchrt, Respekt
This extraordinarily talented prose debut is a first attempt at expressing, in a profound and very individual way, the feelings of a generation who entered life with a deep-seated aversion to the reigning social (the so-called socialist) order, who found themselves practically overnight in a society based on entirely different principles, a market society offering them countless opportunities.
But Topol's novel is anything but a sociological portrait of societal transformation. The hero passes through all sorts of fantastical situations: there are the dream-like images of a visit to Auschwitz, in which one of the heroes wades through the bones of the murdered; there are the dream-like chase scenes with mysterious foreigners; and there is a nearly journalistic account of the flight of the East Germans in the fall of 1989. The plot lines are so complex and interwoven that it makes no sense to summarize them; for that matter, the most important element of this novel is not the plot but the colorful and ever-changing way in which Topol articulates the feelings of the young generation (by which I mean not only the content, but also the language and the imagery).
Topol combines various literary approaches in an original fashion. He is familiar with postmodern approaches, but he is also not afraid to voice stinging condemnations of racism, mafias, the parasitism of "Eurojournalists," and the new post-revolution conformism. He alternates plot-rich passages with dreamy fantasy, lyrical images with images and scenes in which he is clearly trying to evoke the atmosphere of a contemporary myth. These mythical elements, woven throughout the novel's elaborate composition, are its most distinctive feature.
—Ivan Klíma, Czech author of novels such as Judge on Trial and Love and Garbage
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