I, City

I, City is a novel about the north Bohemian city of Most, an ancient city founded on a primeval wetland literally relocated because it stood on a coal field. The city is the narrator of this unusual story telling its own story through its inhabitants, who make their appearances in fleeting, ghost-like vignettes, and Joycean epiphanies. The "I" is a whole consciousness enough removed from the town that it sees and knows everything, past and present. As Most’s people emerge from the pollution and swamp of the town’s founding, their historical that mistrust history, with typical Czech irony. Here, in the city, fictional people say factual things and factual people (Kafka, the Pope, the last president of Communist Czechoslovakia Gustav Husak) say fictional things; this is post-modernity via Marquez and Magical Realism.