Empty Streets, which was originally published in Czech in 2004, is the third of Michal Ajvaz’s novels to be published in English translation by Dalkey Archive Press, and the third that I’ve read and enjoyed. This one is set in Prague in the summer of 1999: when it opens we meet our unnamed narrator, a writer who’s working on a novella but is finding himself buried in paper and unable to tame the story he’s trying to write, which is a “mass of restless, elusive, metamorphosing, barely legible pages” that’s taken over his desk and is “turning into a monstrosity” (4). He takes a walk to take a break, and cuts through a dump on a construction site; he steps on a strange wooden double-trident, and finds himself dreaming up fantastical uses for it as he tries to figure out what it is/does/is for. And then he sees the symbol again, as a screensaver on the computer of a designer he knows, who tells him the story of how he rents a room in a villa from an old man, and saw the double trident appear and disappear again in a framed picture. After which the narrator gets a call from the designer’s landlord, Jakub Jonáš, who tells him the picture is a portrait of his 24-year-old daughter, Viola, who disappeared two years ago.
Despite his initial reluctance, the narrator finds himself agreeing to look for Jonáš’s daughter: as the novel progresses, he finds himself caught up in the search, crossing from one part of the city to another following different leads and hearing different stories that might be related to Viola and/or the strange symbol and/or other possible mysteries that surface along the way. I like the way the stories gradually unspool, the way one person leads the narrator to another and then the way that person leads him on to the next. I found myself thinking, a bit, of the TV show Search Party, with our narrator as analogous to Alia Shawkat’s Dory: they’re each at a point of being stuck in life/work, and for each of them, a mystery rouses them to action, though there’s rather less melodrama in Empty Streets. It’s hard to say more without getting into the lovely convolutions of this book’s plot, which I think are best experienced without knowing much beforehand.
So I’ll just close with an image I like a whole lot: Ajvaz’s narrator has been watching a TV show in which “people at a mansion in (probably) Scotland untangle problems in their love affairs” (26). He then looks out the window, to other apartments on his street, and notices that “In almost every window the light gained and lost intensity to the same rhythm, as the residents of the Scottish mansion moved from the darkness of the drawing room to the terrace and back again” (28).
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