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City Sister Silver
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Wikipedia article
'City Sister Silver' is the title of Alex Zucker's English-language translation of the 1994 novel 'Sestra' by Czech author Jchym Topol, published by Catbird Press in 2000.
The Czech original was described by Czech writer Ivan Klma as "a first attempt at expressing, in a profound and extremely individual way, the feelings of an entire generation," with the central character Potok in a sense embodying the simultaneous feelings of alienation and enormous possibilities of a young adult at the time of the Velvet Revolution and its aftermath.
This is a complex, frequently dark, and often deliberately confusing, novel, with the English translation described by Samuel Thomas as "a difficult experience for a reader unfamiliar with Czech culture [but] beautiful [ . . .] and consistently inventive." Samuel Thomas: "City Sister Silver," in '1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die' (London: Quintet Publishing, 2006), p. 838.
By all accounts, the Czech original is no less challenging or inventive, with Topol making the most of new freedoms to play fast and loose with the conventional rules of written Czech, to the extent that the original was issued with a disclaimer stating the author's intent to "capture language in its unsystematicness and out-of-jointness."Alex Zucker, Translator's Preface, in 'City Sister Silver' (North Haven, CT: Catbird Press, 2000), p. vii.
Footnotes
Category:1994 novels
Category:Czech novels
Category:Novels set in Czechoslovakia
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