In his Translator’s Note to A Sensitive Person, Alex Zucker begins by telling his Anglophone reader that Jáchym Topol was awarded his nation’s highest literary honor by the Czech Ministry of Culture for the novel that was originally published as Citlivý člověk in 2017. In giving the award, special mention was made of Topol’s language and style, the elements that make “Topol’s prose Topolesque,” and which, accordingly, were Zucker’s main focus. The Note, something of a Jamesian preface in its own right, offers insight into what must have been an especially difficult translation job — bringing a large, boisterous, and ambitious novel into an entirely new light, without losing that lauded Topol magic. While this reviewer regrettably lacks any Czech whatsoever, it seems that Zucker lived up to both his task and his note, as A Sensitive Person begins 2023 as one of the more frenetic, rambunctious, and distinctive novels of recent vintage.
Tab, a traveling actor with a penchant for nostalgia, Shakespeare, and soiled notebooks, takes his performing family around Europe from festival to campsite, making their way through borderline alcoholism, police raids, car troubles, and supermarket security. With him is Sońa and his two boys, along with the bric-a-brac of years on the road and those innumerable notebooks. After encountering growing anti-immigrant bigotry in Western Europe, Tab (called Papa by the mischievous narrative entity) looks to return home to the Sázava River, near Prague — where he is promptly falsely accused of a crime and launches out again, this time on the run from authorities with his sons. The book traces these events and their fallout, making for a novel that is at once highly plot-driven and not seemingly overly interested in what actually happens to its characters. As Noted, A Sensitive Person was written during the 2015 European migrant crisis, and Topol, with his background in journalism, deals directly and unabashedly with the associated themes and concepts. Fair warning to the reader— A Sensitive Person is not for those of its title.
There are several competing notions as to what literature “should” do; what the central idea of Literature, capital and broad, ought to be, the goal towards which it should aim. Usually these notions overlap, conjoin for some time and then go their separate ways, before drifting back towards each other to again clash and part. Should literature be written to comment on our world, to remake it in some nebulous image of utopia? Should it render life and its players the way they are, in truth’s dominion over pleasure? (Or should it entertain, some poor souls ask, a notion which need not be entertained?) With A Sensitive Person, Topol offers a firm answer — literature should depict the world as it is, or at any rate some facet of it, blemishes or no, without regard for filter or ease of access. In this, it is a novel to be admired:
“Then they pass through a door and find themselves in the sleeping area. People with backpacks sit on the floor, indifferent to the announcements, as passengers hurry past … They killed us, raped us, a guy hunched over his laptop types, pecking out the letters … Chased us, murdered us … They lie on inflatable mattresses, camping mats, surrounded by the hustle and bustle of the train station … We begged, we wept … the mountains couldn’t hide us, the people wouldn’t hide us … we fled to the sea, we are alive … the guy types out, deafened by the raspy soundtrack of departures and arrivals … And though the road leads nowhere, at least we are here on this earth.”
Zucker notes this passage himself in his Translator’s Note, highlighting Topol’s trademark use of ellipsis (which are in the original above) to scale the narrative focalization as the scene is explored. It is the upshot of so liberal and unconcerned a literary style — free-flowing prose that captures a moment, turning the stuff of life into the stuff of fiction, painful or beautiful as it may be.
Topol pulls no punches in his diction, and Zucker, ever aware to his task of rendering the vagaries of spoken and colloquial Czech into a language that lacks a true equivalent, holds fast the heavy bag. Tab and his sons encounter characters from all walks of life, and they are depicted just as funny, terrible, wonderful, and strange as those out there amongst us. The polyglot superabundance of the prose matches the story of the central characters and the world that spins out around them, these itinerant travelers cajoling a living through performance and wit.
While the migrant crisis is often in the foreground of the book, especially early on, Topol’s Europe is one clouded, too, by Russian threats, a rendering which carries all the more weight in 2023. The Europe of A Sensitive Person is a chaotic and hazardous one, filled with injustice and its legacies, with inequality and desperation. It is also a comedic, picturesque, hopeful place, one that works to bring out the best in people living through the worst. This epicenter, a through-line in much of Topol’s writing and life, is reflected both in his language and his style, and makes A Sensitive Person a challenging and rewarding novel for the English reader.
Alongside those conspicuous ellipses and the (admittedly rather less evident) juxtaposition of colloquial vs. spoken Czech, Topol’s fearful Gemini, language and style, produce another effect of note. That narrative entity, a slippery third-person with little regard for anything like convention, is an amorphous creation. It sticks often to Tab but will freely avail itself of the minds of others; it enjoys giving over the narration for long stretches to dialogue even as it moves freely through time and space; it is brutally honest and paints an often dark and menacing portrait of life but does not hesitate to expound into lush description of the physical world.
This narration is so interesting an approach that two examples may be appropriate to showcase it. The blending of dialogue with stage direction — aided, as is becoming a trend in modern fiction, by omitting quotation marks — heightens the characterization of the narrative entity, alongside idiomatic speech and those resonant descriptions we shall examine in a moment. At times, indeed, it is hard to tell where fictive character ends and fictive narration begins:
“But Sońa, where are we?
Snina Pass, she says, waving her arm in the general direction of the border, where the Carpathian massif rises up out of the mist from the Ukrainian plain. Gateway to Slovakia, you might say. Nice, right?
Very nice!
That’s why Serafion bought the icon.
To take it to the monastery? Papa balls up the general’s coat and adds it to the rising flames, medals included. As the fire heats up, he feeds the cap to it too.
He’s got an older brother here that’s gonna take care of him. And us to! Sposedly his brother’s some big shot. He’s the one guaranteeing us safe passage through the pass. Home!”
Topol’s narrative entity in A Sensitive Person is a prime example of narrative colorization in the third-person, texturizing the narrative as it bends around both character and scene. The result is an increased intimacy with the book itself, a sense of being told this wild, fantastic tale along a treacherous river or under a slicing sunrise. Because, ultimately, the splendor of the physical world is never far from narrative thought:
“Dawn is breaking.
They stop the car at the foot of the mighty, rugged, grapeshot-pitted walls. Even the monastery dome, towering above them, is cracked and riddled with bullet holes. The three-beam slanted cross leans askew towards the sky…
Configurations blaze on the plateau. The borders flicker with dying flames. There are multitudes of them, dozens, perhaps hundreds of fires. In clumps and individually, the distant ones like match heads, the nearer ones like torches kindled upon the dusty, withered earth. It is a scene reminiscent of the night sky fading to dawn, spilled out over the furrowed earth by a tug on the universe, or perhaps some divine whim of God.
The titushki linger around their vehicle. All done up in various bits of uniform, flamboyantly colored combat jackets, tracksuits. Rings, scapularies, crossed, chains around their necks. More than a few sport a chilling assortment of knives tucked into their belts, handcuffs, and various types of torture instruments. Guns and long rifles over their shoulders, Kalashnikovs. Heads shaved bald or in officers’ caps, under sagging banners and monstrances, stripped of their orthodox Stalinist insignia in the course of rowdy punch-ups.”
Passages such as this one come often, presenting an arresting admixture of a harsh, plot-driven storyline, filled with corruption and danger, with a European landscape painted by an acolyte’s brush, aiming to capture and celebrate the natural artistry of his homeland. These descriptive abilities are a clear strength of Topol’s, and one that helps to carry his celebrated language and style — which, to be sure, presents drawbacks, most notably in the thinness of the book’s protagonist and the difficulty presented to the reader — through its most challenging stretches.
Those questions remain, and one cannot help but wonder if the narrative entity was perhaps given a bit too much leeway in its storytelling, leaving Tab somewhat malnourished in the literary cold, but the sheer abundance and enthusiasm of the writing go a long way towards recompense. These are difficult things, to show the world as it is, to challenge one’s audience at every turn, to portray with accuracy and honesty the horror and the wonder of everyday life. But if they are hard they are all the more important, and A Sensitive Person reminds us of the true power of language — what it can demand and what it can give.
[Published by Yale University Press on January 3, 2023, 384 pages, $20.009 hardcover. A title in the press’ Margellos World Republic of Letters series]