The Other City by Michal AjvazTranslated by Gerald TurnerDalkey Archive Press, 2009

The Other City is strange and wonderful, a book about seeing, a book about reading. It’s a slim novel, but one to read slowly: it’s full of images that I wanted to linger over. It starts normally enough: a winter day, an antiquarian bookshop, snow starting to fall outside, the smell and texture of paper. But then our narrator finds a book in a new language, not just a language he doesn’t know but a language whose characters he’s never even seen before, and he starts questioning the reality that most people take for granted. He thinks the book must come from elsewhere, from someplace utterly strange yet also extremely close: “The frontier of our world is not far away; it doesn’t run along the horizon or in the depths. It glimmers faintly close by, in the twilight of our nearest surroundings; out of the corner of our eye we can always glimpse another world, without realizing it” (p 2). And so begins his obsession with the place where the book has come from, this other world, this other city.

The other city is a shadow-Prague, a nighttime Prague, an underwater Prague, a different city that uses the spaces left empty or ignored by the daytime Prague, and a city with its own culture, customs, objects, religious rituals. Sometimes its signs and objects are seen in the daytime Prague; sometimes there are unexplained strangenesses: “Someone found a live wriggling starfish on their wet living-room carpet one morning, someone else was waiting for a train one evening at a little station and climbed aboard a car whose interior consisted of a cold Gothic chapel” (p 12). But mostly, the narrator thinks, we see what we expect to see; we think about the things for which we have a vocabulary and ignore everything else.

But we can look in the corners, in the empty spaces, in the nighttime streets, and that’s what the narrator starts to do. He finds that the other city is a place of subterranean churches, of sea creatures and the cult of a god mauled by a tiger, a place “where folds in fabric are more important than faces and have names, whereas thickets of faces merge into an indifferent blur” (p 34). It’s a city of menace but also of charm and beauty, a place where twenty-inch-tall elk live inside the statues on Charles Bridge, with a man who comes around to clean up after them and give them fresh food and water. The narrator sits in a darkened restaurant and watches, and there’s this, which is just so lovely: “The elks made long graceful leaps and their antlers drew lines of light in the darkness” (p 98). The narrator moves through the other city, letting events lead him from place to place, hoping to find its center, with the fountains and palaces of which he’s heard its inhabitants talk, but he only finds apartment buildings, a shipwreck, a jungle, a temple. The temple-keeper tells him there is no center, tells him that there “is an endless chain of cities, a circle without beginning or end,” and goes on to enumerate the other other cities (p 155):

There is the city-jungle and the city where people live in the pillars of tall viaducts that crisscross each other in countless overpasses and underpasses, the city of sounds and nothing else, the city in the swamp, the city of smooth white balls rolling on concrete, the city comprising apartments spread across several continents, the city where sculptures fall endlessly from dark clouds and smash on the paving stones, the city where the moon’s path passes through the insides of apartments. (pp 155-156)

Which isn’t quite what our narrator has been hoping to hear. Exhausted, he makes his way home, where he realizes what he’s already been told: that you only can set off for the heart of the other city when you leave your own city behind entirely; you can only fully enter a world different from your own when you leave behind all the rules and questions of your world, when you stop trying to make sense of the other world by the grammar of your own.