The Other City

Louis Aragon's 1926 novel/treatise/memoir "Paris Peasant" tried to re-imagine the function of mythology, which had once ordered and articulated a contingent, amoral universe. Aragon, a prominent member of the French Surrealist movement, sought to argue in favor of looking beyond the surfaces and reinventing the mundane into something wonderfully subjective. The modern world is still full of possibilities: you just have to be willing to look for them. I had no idea that I also owned the uncredited sequel to "Paris Peasant." Now it is one thing to just think up new, radical ideas in literature. It is quite another thing to actually realize them. I don't think anyone truly succeeded in mythologizing the modern and wedding metaphysics to art and literature until Czech author Michal Ajvaz came along and wrote "The Other City" in 1993. "The Other City" is not simply a study of different modes of seeing and interpreting. It is not a treatise. It is a book that takes the Surrealist transformation of everyday objects and crosses the border into speculative fiction. It is simultaneously an argument in favor looking beyond and beneath words and surfaces, and the story of a man who discovers another world embedded in our own. Think of a cross between "Paris Peasant" and Italo Calvino's "Invisible Cities" and you'll have at least a partial idea of what Ajvaz has accomplished. One snowy afternoon in a used bookstore, Ajvaz's unnamed narrator comes across a purple-bound volume written in an unknown language, accompanied by several strange illustrations. He takes it to a scholar, who is immediately unnerved and recommends that he put the book back and forget the whole thing. Instead, the narrator's curiosity is intensified, and he quickly finds himself wandering deep down the rabbit hole. As with "Last Nights of Paris," by Louis Aragon's compatriot Philippe Soupault, there is a very Surrealist preoccupation with chance and spontaneity. Although the narrator does have a fixed goal in mind - to learn more about this other dimension and eventually reach its core - the unfolding of his knowledge occurs not through rational, deliberate clue-seeking but via unexpected encounters with fantastical beings and bizarre situations, such as the time he wrestles with a shark behind a cafe and ends up impaling it on a cross held by a statue on the St. Nicholas parapet. The speech of the otherworld denizens is appropriately meandering, full of long-winded nonsensical tangents and built on wild metaphors and unexpected juxtapositions that put me in mind of William S. Burroughs's "cut-up" method. The dialogue isn't simply randomness, however, or weirdness for the sake of weirdness. Ajvaz, through his haunting and beautifully jumbled prose, somehow articulates the inarticulate. As such, "The Other City" is deeply instinctive. That's the one word I can use to describe it. The language and spaces of the Other City are the dark areas under furniture and in the backs of drawers and

I love this book. It brings us to another Prague that "glimmers faintly close by, in the twilight of our nearest surroundings." The author depicts a bizarre, detailed, dream-like city that can be entered through simple doors, alleys or library corridors. Ajvaz' imagery and language are unlike anything I have come across recently and represents a strange hybrid of Kafka's sensibility and Dali's worldview. The author shows a fine sense of pacing. Just as he tempts the reader into strange and uncomfortable settings, made real by telling details, internally consistent unreality and exquisitely chosen words, the author transports us back to the real city before we can tire of his vision. In the end, The Other City is a celebration of the courage needed to encounter the unknown. "The dread you feel on the preiphery of your world is the beginning of the bliss of return." There may be danger, but even defeat in the quest can merge with the joy of the journey and become part of it. What matters is the ability to enter a landscape from which society tries to protect us while, at the same time, denying us the right to become our true selves in the experience. The narrator accepts this challenge: "I abandoned myself to the power of the journey and didn't know whether in the future the journey would command me to remain outside the walls, or to return with my knapsack full of tongues cut from the maws of dragons." This is a compact gem of a book. The wonderful and surreal events endured by the narrator become, in the end, the as yet unknown and unformed challenges we face when we have the courage to embrace change. In image and message, The Other City marries the surreal to the mundane. This artful juxtaposition enriches and informs the readers' experience. Finally, "we are troubled by the dark music heard from over the border, which undermines our order." The question posed is whether we follow where the music leads us.

The Other City by Michal Ajvaz is by far the oddest book I have read this year and it has been quite a year for odd books. But where Smith's Only Forward and Harkaway's The Gone-Away World was odd because of the absurdity and, in the case of the latter, randomness found within, The Other City is odd because it presents a world of wonderment that exists all around us and that we willingly blind ourselves to. It is a world that is so alien to ours that a jungle can exist in a closet, that armies gradually turn into coats, and passenger ships voyage through the space between bookshelves. It is random and it is absurd, but unlike the aforementioned, it is not used for humor, nor is it strange for the sake of strangeness. Rather, the absurdity and the randomness is used to craft a fringe world so curious and surreal that it sucks the reader into its labyrinthine spaces, just as it does the narrator. The most fascinating thing about this book, in terms of writing and not story, are the paragraphs. In our internet culture it is not uncommon to stumble across some post on a forum or a blog or wherever you may be that does not have a character or word limit that consists of one massive paragraph, Most refer to it as a wall of text and they are right to do so. No one likes them, no one wants to read them, and it is frustrating for all. I feel the same about books, mostly because the longer I read without some break the more likely I am to become distracted by thought or something shiny lurking across the room and have my concentration shatter to a thousand pieces. This was one of the main reasons I stopped reading Zelazny's The Guns of Avalon. The Other City erupts spontaneously into pages-long passages consisting of one paragraph, usually of dialogue. This is something that I would expect to grate on my nerves, to frustrate me until the only end possible: putting down the book. Further, the passages are rambling and random, only just bordering on the edge of coherence and trying to figure out if it would rather hop the low fence and dance off into the chaos of insane gibberish. But, oddly enough, I found that I was not put off by these passages or by the fact that they were walls of text, horrendously long walls of text. It was just the opposite, in fact. Instead I was drawn deeper into the story, into the spaces between apartments and the underground chapels filled with aquarium statues, and before I knew it I was rushing headlong through these surreal narratives filled with the weird, wondrous, and fascinating. There were no breaks, no pauses, just the sustained, relentless, narratives that led on and on down the rabbit hole. Which is not to say that I did not have my issues with the paragraphs. I soon discovered that I needed to devote my full attention to the book and in such cases everything becomes a distraction. There were times when either my mind would wander off on some loose thread or someone would interrupt me and I would be forced from the