Angel Station

by Jachym Topol, Alex Zucker (Translator)

Overview

Jachym Topol is the most-translated Czech author of his generation, lauded for his imaginative storytelling and his inventive use of language. Melding fiction and documentary, with a dash of black humor on the side, he zeroes in on the agonies and injustices of the totalitarian past, in his own country and throughout Central and Eastern Europe.

Angel Station takes its title from the bustling Metro stop in the Prague district of Smíchov. Until the gentrification of the late 1990s, it was a rough-and-tumble, working-class neighborhood with a sizeable Roma and Vietnamese population. Topol’s novel, in sparse yet poetic language—agilely brought into English by the author’s longtime translator Alex Zucker—weaves together the brutal and disturbing fates of an addict, a shopkeeper, and a religious fanatic as they each follow the path they hope will lead them to serenity: drugs, money, and faith.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781943150120
Publisher:	Dalkey Archive Press
Publication date:	05/26/2017
Series:	Czech Literature Series
Edition description:	Translatio
Pages:	152
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x (d)

About the Author

Jáchym Topol is the author of novels, poetry, stories, dramas, screenplays, reportage, and song lyrics. His novel The Devil’s Workshop won an English PEN Award for Writing in Translation and was longlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the Best Translated Book Award (Fiction). His novel City Sister Silver was featured in 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die. He is the winner of the Vilenica International Literary Prize (Slovenia), and two of the most prestigious Czech literary awards, the Tom Stoppard Prize and the Jaroslav Seifert Prize.

Alex Zucker’s translations include three previous books by Jáchym Topol—The Devil’s Workshop, City Sister Silver, and A Trip to the Train Station—as well as novels by Tomáš Zmeškal, Magdaléna Platzová, Josef Jedlička, Heda Margolius Kovály, Petra Hůlová, Patrik Ouředník, and Miloslava Holubová. From 2014 to 2016, he served as cochair of the PEN America Translation Committee. He currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Editorial Reviews

2017-04-04
A Czech junkie blows his last shot at redemption.Zucker explains in a rich translator's note that this brutal little novel by inventive wordsmith Topol (The Devil's Workshop, 2013, etc.), published in Czech in 1995, is the third entry in a prose triptych depicting Prague as the city evolved beyond the end of communism. It accomplishes its goal, as does its 2000 no-budget film adaptation (Angel Exit). However, with its harsh colloquial language, colorful descriptions, and heavy focus on drugs, the novel recalls nothing so much as Irvine Welsh's cult classic, Trainspotting (1996). The book's main protagonist is Hooks, a meth addict who's spent the last few years bouncing in and out of insane asylums. Unlike Welsh's colorful cast, Hooks is deeply, painfully aware of what he's going through. "He knew whoever takes a drug, himself becomes the drug," Topol writes. "And either they stop or they're dead. He knew drugs had killed even among the first people. He knew drugs had come down to him through a chain of human bodies. Drugs circulate via bodies, live off the bodies of dead addicts. He knew it but left it for later." Via a strange accident, Hooks and kind-of-girlfriend Vera cook up a batch of meth so powerful it catalyzes the local Mafia to make an order too big to be filled. Eventually Vera figures out that the secret ingredient in Hooks' superdrug is his own blood. There's also some domestic drama with Hooks' ex Lyuba, who's pregnant—when Hooks asks her if it's his, her response is reflective of the book's laissez faire attitude toward the world: "I think so. You've just gotta take it for what it is." Hooks' language is starkly evocative, kept whole by Zucker's insistence on not "normalizing" his unique voice. But it's a very harsh tale, made more so by a devastating ending. A graphic, grungy tale of addiction and consequences.

Kirkus Reviews