Książka − medium transgresji. „Druhé mesto” Michala Ajvaza
The Book − a Medium of Transgression. Michal Ajvaz’s „Other City”

Summary/Abstract: The article is an analysis of the novel by Michał Ajvaz − Other City through the prism of the protagonist’s journey from the book to the library. Found in an old antique bookshop in Prague, the volume in a velvety purple cover, written in a script not belonging to any of the peoples living on earth, is the beginning of a fantastic adventure of the main character-narrator. The mysterious book turns out to be a sign pointing to the space of another city, whose limits extend ‘in the twilight of the margins of our narrow reality’. The most unobvious places in Prague become the moments of contact between two spaces which are built as a mirror analogy. The most important gate to another city (world) is the university library Clementium, which is a bipartite structure − the library flows smoothly into the jungle. There, books and shelves form a kind of compost, culture is absorbed by nature and books, as paper artefacts, seem to symbolically return to it.

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