Potok is a young sometimes-actor, playwright and hustler living in Prague. He hangs out with a ‘tribe’ of others like him. But he also has a mission to find his soulmate or ‘sister’. He is still immersed in memories of his first sweetheart — “Little White She-dog” — who was with him as the old order crumbled. She later disappears, and Potok seeks to recreate the bond he had with her.

The book opens with the mass exodus of East Germans through Prague on their way to the West. Potok describes the heady, confused days just after 1989 in the capital of the country that used to be Czechoslovakia. “It started with the sweeping away of walls and the exchanging of souvenirs. I’ll trade you a piece of the wall for a bullet shell from the square, a lump of candlewax, a piece of phone-tap wire, as time went by I lost my collection…”

‘City Sister Silver’ is what is often described as a ‘challenging’ read. As much as I dislike a certain snotty work ethic-infested view of literature — can’t be real lit if it’s not a major strain to read! — City is well worth the effort. It has been dubbed “the Czech Trainspotting” for its portrayal of a group of drifters in Prague and its use of vernacular. But this book has a much wider scope as it explores the impact of cataclysmic social change on individual lives. Topol’s weaving of contemporary journeys with myth and history achieves epic proportions. Dreams also are at the core of the novel, including a harrowing visit by the gang to Auschwitz.

Soon Potok finds what he is looking for with a singer called Cerná. There is a moving description of how these two tough characters discover growing intimacy and tenderness. Both have been abused; they have acted for a living and adopt a variety of masks and poses in other parts of their lives. As they create their own private world together, they drop those masks.

‘Byznyz’ and police difficulties force them to leave Prague, and they embark on a journey through the hinterlands of a Europe where the change has just put another set of gangsters in charge — with more things to sell. This is the darkest and most powerful section of the book. You are not allowed the distancing effect of a dream sequence. Scene after scene plunges into a lyrical state of madness where divisions between reality and nightmare dissolve in a world of desperation and a constant struggle to survive.

After a lift from a mobile whorehouse, Potok and Cerná end up in a little town straddling a border. At the local fleamarket they are surrounded by “the dregs of Eastern Europe” hawking Soviet-era tat “from toothbrushes to bayonets”; orchards of identical ashtrays, Soviet army cast-offs, little Lenins and mugs with portraits of the soldier Svejk, maps, charts and a model pterodactyl and stuffed weasel:“Probly robbed a school… what for I donno, schools’re broke, everyone’s in byznys these days.”

Yet Potok sees another side to this, and anticipates what will later come: “I’m all soft an my insides’re trembling, take a look, Cerná, this is our last chance to see this stuff… I know it’s abominable an lotsa these people’re nothing but dim-witted snot-nosed burglars, but wait’ll they plow it allover with ads.” A brief passing-through turns into a way of life with no end in sight. They live on odd-jobs and scraps, while employment in the whorehouse van beckons to Cerna. Potok gets constantly drunk. Soon the lovers quarrel and Potok flees.

After a grisly experience in the Berlin porn industry Potok returns to Prague. He finds that his block of flats had been turned into a posh hotel, his possessions in the city dump. He ends up in the dump himself, living with a tribe of derelicts who are stalked by a serial killer. Potok may or may not have killed the murderer when he leaves the dump, or perhaps he tried to kill himself; now he’s set on returning to life in the city and reunion with Cerna. “I just climbed down a high wall, now I’m on the other side… and I’m going to live and I’m not going back in there, not anymore.”

Topol’s writing dazzles as it mutates between streams of argot and languages-within-languages. Translator Alex Zucker has performed an equal feat in rendering these shifting streams of speech, thought and reality into English. A glossary provides explanations of the Czech references. However, an extravagant use of ellipses in some parts — pretty much in place of full stops — often got irritating. Though meant to convey fragmentary thoughts and a breathless pace, over-use makes the eye skim over the text instead of read. The end section of the novel is less ellipsis-happy. Could this be one reason why it came across as the most compelling part of the book?

I finished ‘Sister’ wondering what this story would have been like from Cerna’s point of view. As with a lot of ‘tough’ and ‘real’ fiction, there often is a lack of female viewpoints if not female characters. Blokes writing about blokes is fine, especially if it's as good as this. But sometimes I'd like a change. Catbird also publishes a story collection by a post-‘89 woman writer: ‘Fingers Pointing Somewhere Else’ by Daniela Fischerová. I think that’s what I'll check out next!

Rosanne Rabinowitz’s published fiction includes stories in The Third Alternative, Visionary Tongue and Roadworks, plus a contribution to The Slow Mirror: New Fiction by Jewish Writers and Deep Ten. She has reviewed books for TTA as well. She lives in South London with a venerable 16-year-old cat, and sometimes works as a freelance sub-editor on various magazines and websites. She has also been a life model, oral history researcher, part-time mental health worker, full-time doley and an editor of the late great Bad Attitude, a feminist mag ‘devoted to the overthrow of civilisation as we know it’. A graduate of the Sheffield Hallam MA in Writing, she has completed Noise Leads Me - a kind of anti-capitalist vampire novel set in Brixton ( looking for a forward-thinking publisher unfazed by genre boundaries!). Currently she is working on a second novel about a woman leader of the Adamites, a wild, anarchistic free-loving movement in 15th century Hussite Bohemia.

© 2004 Laura Hird All rights reserved.