Alica is a dyslexic teenager in Czechoslovakia. She wants a better life than what her mean and often quite thin circumstances will allow. Answering an ad to learn how to type does teach her that, but opens her up to two worlds. One is a chance at a job within the Communist Party, putting her in the halls of power at a propitious time, and a chance to make a life for herself. The other world revolves around a tapestry. A unicorn tapestry, in fact. But this is not just any copy of the famous medieval work. This is a unicorn tapestry that has an interior world of its own for Alica to immerse herself in. An interior world of symbolism that connects to the real world that Alica is faced with. A world that shows that Alica can have and wield more power than she imagines.
This is the story of J.M. Sidorova’s The Witch of Prague.
Sidorova’s novel starts off, strongly and boldly as a historical fiction novel about a time and place that is likely to be unfamiliar to a lot of readers. The author immerses us in Alica’s life, allowing us to get used to what life in a Soviet satellite state on the cusp of a brief and vibrant change is life. Alica’s life is not a happy or easy one when we meet her--she is dyslexic (and only learns that thanks to her typing tutor). The privations, in freedom as well as goods, and quality of life in the time and place of Soviet Czechoslovakia is made clear, in large and small ways. And yet at the same time we get to see the brief cracks in the wall of Soviet control and domination of the country as music and other ideas are briefly and haltingly impinge on Alica. A movie director from Italy. Music from the Rolling Stones. Foods from beyond the Iron Curtain. These small details, these dollops of a world that might be, show the contrast of what the world is, and what it might be, for Alica, and the other denizens of Prague.
As a result, the novel quite effectively captures not just the place of Prague but the moment of the Prague Spring, its run up and its brief flowering. It is the fragilest of flowers, and it did not last, but we can see, through Alica’s story and her interactions, how that brief, beautiful flowering could and did happen. We see the dark and dank soil of the greyness and relentless nature of authoritarian Soviet Czechoslovakia, and then we see that grasping for the light, a grasping and a search for a different way of living. The writing of the novel is immersive, evocative, and a unique and strong voice. Alica makes for an engaging young protagonist as she tries to navigate her family, a potential romance, work colleagues and rivals. Also, Alica finds that benign a woman in a patriarchal authoritarian workforce is often a very dark place indeed to inhabit. The author does not soft pedal what is like for Alica in her job in a Government ministry as a young woman, and some incidents in the book can be uncomfortable to read.
The magical realism elements of the book enter slowly, a steady drip of the fantastic (or fantastika, in the Gary K. Wolfe sense of the word). This is a book I feel that fits his idea of “evaporating genres”, as the novel effortlessly uses its historical fiction chassis to inject the magical realism, but not really to the levels you might expect in an urban fantasy novel. It’s not that the magic isn’t quite real, but it can be quite subtle.
The magical realism relies on the aforementioned unicorn tapestry, which does turn out to have magical power, and Alica’s relationship (such as it is) with it, and with its power. Again, aside from Alica’s brief immersions into the “world” of the tapestry, the magic that we see her eventually be able to wield, through the tapestry, is quite light. But it is the symbolism and the use of the tapestry as metaphor and as a framework for understanding what is happening in the Prague Spring is where the novel shines. If you consider the story told in the Unicorn Tapestries, one can see analogues and parallels between the elements we see in the tapestry and the real world, and Alica is caught, as it were, in between these two worlds. She doesn’t understand or parse what the tapestry is telling her, but the metaphors and literary use of the tapestry is a commentary and a frame for readers to parse what is happening in Alica’s real life. And, inevitably, that commentary has things to say with the burgeoning Prague Spring, too.
As a reader who prefers more fantasy elements than not in a novel, sometimes this novel was a little too mimetic for my general taste--but the historical richness and the attention to detail and the immersion of place helped allay my concerns. The Prague Spring has, in my personal experience, been not much more than a phrase, and some dimly remembered and briefly covered events in High school and college history courses. My knowledge in general of life behind the Iron Curtain has been similarly just some bits I’ve picked up, as well as anecdotes from some friends and acquaintances who had dared to go there.
So, that aforementioned historical fictional detail really did, for me, make up for the sometimes very light touch on the fantasy. In a way, given the time, and distance, and the world having changed so much from now to then, The Prague of 1968 really is a “different country” than anything in the experience of a vast majority of potential readers. As a result, it is a look into a something uncomfortable, sometimes dark, but also a hopeful place. In the slow run up to the actual rush of events of the Prague Spring itself, the author engages us, carefully and in measured portions, of a world that could have been, an awakening that does not fully happen in the end. But part of the point of the book, as we look in the interior life of Alica and the world of the unicorn tapestry, as well as the events of the book, is that the fight, the brief window of resisting a seemingly unstoppable empire, is a fight that is worth having even if the victory is transitory and fleeting. It is worth it to carve out those brief moments of joy, those brief moments of reprieve. It is worth it to fight, even if the odds seem daunting, and even if the victories are small and do not immediately last.
The story of the Prague Spring, as filtered through magical realism in The Witch of Prague, is a story, then, that has strong resonance in a world where authoritarian forces are on the rise and are seeking to shut down dissent and resistance. It is a novel that is ostensibly magical realism historical fiction, but like a lot of fiction, it is a novel about today and a novel FOR today.
The Witch of Prague is currently being funded on Kickstarter.
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Highlights:
- Magical realism novel with a light touch on the magic
- Strong historical fictional detail of Prague in a propitious time
- Strong use of symbolism and tie into its themes and ideas
POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I'm just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.
