Translated by David Short
Foreword by Rajendra Chitnis
Originally commissioned for a French series of alternative guidebooks, Hodrová's novel is a conscious addition to the tradition of Prague literary texts by, for example, Karel Hynek Mácha, Jakub Arbes, Gustav Meyrink and Franz Kafka, who present the city as a hostile living creature or labyrinthine place of magic and mystery in which the individual human being may easily get lost.
Suffused with the atmosphere of the year following the fall of the Communist regime, Prague. I see a city… takes the form of a novel of quest, in which the heroine abandons the material world of everyday society and linear history, perceiving it as false, temporary and distracting, and journeys in search of her true identity.
With a foreword by Rajendra A. Chitnis, Senior Lecturer, Russian and Czech, University of Bristol.
