The Other City

In this strange and lovely hymn to Prague, Michal Ajvaz repopulates thecity of Kafka with ghosts, eccentrics, talking animals, and impossiblestatues, all lurking on the peripheries of a town so familiar totourists. The Other City is a guidebook to this invisible,"other Prague," overlapping the workaday world: a place where librariescan turn into jungles, secret passages yawn beneath our feet, and waveslap at our bedspreads. Heir to the tradition and obsessions of JorgeLuis Borges, as well as the long and distinguished line of Czechfantasists, Ajvaz's Other City--his first novel to be translatedinto English--is the emblem of all the worlds we are blind to, beingcaught in our own ways of seeing.