Book report: "The Witch of Prague"
1960s Czechoslovakia, bodily autonomy, and unicorns. Available now!
Welcome back to Novel Curations and my first review of a new release—The Witch of Prague by J.M. Sidorova. It’s the first novel published by Homeward Books, a small press:
We publish books that defy the constraints of genre, because we believe that weird, brave, complex stories deserve a home. Our books are not the books you’ll find anywhere else, but they’ll carry you far from yourself and delve deep into your heart.
The story follows the narrator-protagonist Alica and her life leading up to and including the Prague Spring (1968). Her family life is unhappy, with an abusive stepfather and a mother who doesn’t protect her. She desperately wants a new life, to be independent and move away from home.
Then one day, an opportunity presents itself: a newspaper ad that says, “An old lady will give lessons in typewriting and stenography to a judicious young girl in exchange for light household help.” Alica responds to the ad and begins an apprenticeship of sorts under the old lady, Agáta Riedl.
Agáta teaches Alica many things, not just typing. For one, she teaches Alica an attitude toward life and how to get what she wants as a woman in 1960s Prague. With her support, Alica gets hired as a secretary in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and is pulled into the heart of political intrigue that culminates in the Prague Spring.
Part history, part magical realism
Agáta owns an old tapestry that illustrates the hunt of the unicorn. Its panels magically rearrange themselves, changing the story of the tapestry. Both Agáta and Alica are certain that the panels correspond to reality, but the how remains unclear. This puzzle of symbolism and metaphor is core to the experience of reading the novel.
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The gray concrete reality of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic and the lush magical forest of the tapestry come together to create an atmosphere that I would describe as a marriage of Soviet Brutalism and German Romanticism.
Bureaucracy, women, and The Castle
The tapestry is a magical item that chooses its mistress and gifts her magical powers. The witch of Prague is the woman who is chosen by the tapestry. This was originally Agáta, and her heir is Alica.
The magic of “the witch of Prague” is an understanding of and ability to exploit the totalitarian system. The state bureaucracy is so strange and absurd that just navigating it successfully is a show of magic. This conception of bureaucracy also appears in the Apple TV show Severance and many of Kafka’s works, such as The Castle.
The Castle follows the protagonist “K”, a land surveyor whose presence has been requested by a village government who operates out of the titular castle. K was originally summoned by an official named Klamm, whose note instructed him to report to the mayor. The mayor, however, says that this was a communication error and that a land surveyor isn’t needed. K wants to speak directly with Klamm and tries to reach him, but his attempts are repeatedly thwarted by the bureaucratic labyrinth, full of loops and dead-ends.
The castle appears to be occupied almost exclusively by men who interact with women exclusively for sexual companionship. This status of women in the bureaucratic system is central to The Witch of Prague. Women, even when they’re working skilled jobs, are expected to fulfill the role of sex objects. For example, when Alica is working for General Blaha, she is expected to type flawlessly while he gropes her.
Agáta’s mentorship is essentially about teaching Alica how to utilize existing systems of oppression for her own benefit. In part, this means using her status as a sex object to seduce men, but more than that, it means exploiting the bureaucratic system of the totalitarian state.
Dyslexia and the written word
Alica is dyslexic, and this gives her an interesting relationship to the written word. Despite working as a typist, she’s convinced that these typed words are treacherous—out to get you, fool you, or threaten you.
Alica’s dyslexia reflects the meaninglessness of words in a totalitarian society. All communication is propaganda; there is no truth in anything.
In one scene, Alica fantasizes about defacing a page of shorthand in front of her boss:
And then I told him that I used to think that the sentences like the ones he dictated were like magic incantations. But they were worse than that. They were as if the words, with their common, natural meanings, were cut up alive and sewn together, coerced to become unnatural chimeras of meaning, alive enough and crawling, crawling over my discarded body parts. Healthy patriotic forces. Liberalism is a threat to democracy. This assault is a celebration of love.
This reminded me of George Orwell’s 1984 as well as the acceptance of contradictory communications in The Castle.
Prague Spring and The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Perhaps the most famous novel set in the Prague Spring period is Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being. It has a temporal overlap with The Witch of Prague, since it covers the whole of 1968, including the Soviet invasion that ended the Prague Spring. However, while The Witch of Prague drops off at this point, The Unbearable Lightness also covers the period following the Prague Spring, into the mid 1970s.
Stylistically, the two novels are very different, but this is why it would be interesting to read them together; they provide different perspectives on life during this time.
Tomas is the protagonist of The Unbearable Lightness. He is a brain surgeon and an unstoppable womanizer, who openly continues his philandering even after he gets into a relationship with the one woman he actually loves. The story follows Tomas, Tereza (the woman he loves), Sabina (his mistress and best friend), and Franz (Sabina’s lover). The book covers a wide range of themes, but a central one is the complexity of the individual person vs. a totalitarian regime’s absurd mission to flatten out this complexity.
This “flattening out” is related to Kundera’s conception of “kitsch”. Kundera writes that kitsch is “the absolute denial of shit”: it excludes the contradictory, ambiguous, difficult-to-reconcile aspects of human existence. It produces a harmonized emotional consensus, encouraging predictable affective responses; it simplifies reality in order to create sentimental unity.
The interaction between the individual and the system is also a major theme in The Witch of Prague, but the focus is more on how bewildering the system is for the individual—so much so that it lies in the realm of magic and unicorns.
Final thoughts
I enjoyed reading the book. It’s a story with many themes and possible interpretations—a great pick for book club. From a technical perspective, I would say that its strong point is narrative structure, as it’s very engaging and well-paced.
It doesn’t make it into my lineup of favorites because of its prose, which I found clumsy in parts. However, it could also be argued that this clumsiness makes sense for the story, which is narrated by a teenage girl who has little interface with existing literature because of her dyslexia. (It is mentioned explicitly multiple times that Alica doesn’t read much.)
A friend recently asked about my taste in books. I told her that I like books that are well-balanced, and The Witch in Prague is well-balanced in many ways. It successfully rides the line between accessible and experimental. It references other texts and philosophical ideas without falling into the trap of name-dropping pretentiousness. It makes heavy use of symbols and metaphors without being esoteric. It keeps the magical elements intact while still giving them symbolic power.
I would recommend it widely but especially if you are interested in a novel that actively invites you to engage in interpretation. Much of the fun in reading The Witch of Prague lies in thinking with Alica, in trying to figure out how the various symbols and metaphors relate to reality.
In that way, reading The Witch of Prague is a bit like watching the moving panels on the magical unicorn tapestry.
Where you can get it
The Witch of Prague can be ordered online from the publisher’s official website. It’s also available as an eBook. I believe you can also get it at select independent bookstores in New York City and Seattle.
A few similar-ish reads
These are some books that share certain elements with The Witch of Prague:
The Bad Girl by Mario Vargas Llosa: A novel that follows the life of the protagonist, Ricardo, throughout the latter half of the 20th century. Ricardo is in love with the titular bad girl who jumps in and out of his life. Each time she appears, she’s someone else—an upper-class girl from Chile, an activist on her way to Cuba, the wife of a high-ranking UNESCO official, the sex slave of a Japanese business man. Like The Witch of Prague, it’s both the story of the protagonist’s life and a historical account of the 20th century.
Les Misérables by Victor Hugo: A very long novel that follows multiple characters whose paths cross in various ways throughout the book. The stories of the individual characters are tightly interwoven with the historical and political context of post-revolutionary France. It has in common with The Witch of Prague this interweaving of greater historical narratives with the lives of individuals.
The Children of the Dead by Elfriede Jelinek: A novel in the gothic tradition that explores Austria’s involvement in the Holocaust. The setting is an idyllic vacation spot in the Austrian mountains that is also a mass Holocaust burial site. Similar to The Witch of Prague, it uses magic to represent reality at its most terrifyingly unfathomable.
His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman: This is a fantasy trilogy that features magical items. The central item is the alethiometer—a device that uses symbols to divine the truth. Of course, in order to use it, you must be capable of reading and interpreting the symbols. Like The Witch of Prague, it plays with symbolism and the ambiguity of metaphors.
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Wonderful review! It was interesting to read your comparison with The Castle, that hadn’t occurred to me at the time. I agree, the book is a real page-turner and the pacing is excellent. While reading, I kept trying to figure out what the tapestry represented, and I’m not sure I ever found a clear answer :) It was great fun!