"The Layers of the City by Antoni Jach is wonderful. It is
unusual and plotless in the traditional sense. The city is Paris.
The narrative voice takes the reader from cafe tables to musings
on the Internet to delvings into the history trapped in the geological
strata beneath the city, to lovely, sharp philosophical moments.
I confess I adore this kind of thing.
Exploring the past, putting on it an
ironic and commonsense present spin, Antoni Jach has brought to
life Paris, which is his principal character in this book. He
has also while exposing and confronting the horrors of history,
distant and recent, composed a lyrical hymn and a solace. There
are sweet strong notes of optimism and harmony in spite of the
horrors and discords of recorded events."
Carmel Bird, from "Spins on the Past," The Age, 15 May 1999
"It's a meditation this book and, I'll be frank, it's not an easy read but it is a rewarding one... It's a meditation on what it means to be civilised and where Australians of European descent have come from. A meditation sparked by angst-ridden contemplation of the many layers of the city of Paris...
"...a polyphonic novel..."
Robert Dessaix, ABC Radio, Books and Writing, broadcast July '99
"Jach is a Melbourne writer whose works sit better alongside European writers such as Italo Calvino and Roberto Calasso rather than other Australian writers such as Elizabeth Jolley and Tim Winton.
"The book is more about language
-- its rhythm and potency -- than plot and though there is some
action when the narrator is transported back to Roman times after
fainting in an archaeological crypt, the main character is Paris
itself."
Blanche Clark, from "A peep at Paris, its warts and all",
Melbourne Herald-Sun , 5/6/99
"In this formally inventive hybrid
of a novel, Jach's perverse tour takes us on a dizzy and vertiginous
spiral down through the historical layers of Paris..."
"The novel's image-laden, staccato
sentences build up a similar sense of dire time-lapse and montage,
and Jach's prose rhythms are often as obsessively circular and
repetitive as a Philip Glass soundtrack."
"Jach's daring, ambitious -- and
largely successful novel..."
John Jenkins, Heat 14, March, 2000
"Antoni Jach's highly original novel The Layers of the City dispenses with conventional notions of character and action and concentrates almost entirely on ideas and concepts, especially the notion that we build on the rubble of the past. Despite that though it is written with great sensuousness and imagination.
"The barbarians are set against
the Romans as the exemplars of rugged individuality versus more
effete civilisations. The novel is in part a kind of hymn to Paris
and to cities generally. It is written in a European tradition
of thoughtful, dispassionate fiction."
Laurie Clancy and Morag Fraser
From the judges' report of shortlisted books, The Age Book of the Year awards 1999
The Age 14 August 1999
"Melbourne writer Antoni Jach doesn't seem to be attracted
to the form that most of us think of as "the novel".
"His own are utterly idiosyncratic, the first, The Weekly Card Game (1994), a clever, glancing, moody, very funny look at the rituals which people protect themselves from the tawdry realities of everyday life, the second a virtually plotless, characterless, highly literary meditation on civilisation set in, on and under that most civilised of cities, Paris.
"More manifesto than novel, and
often demanding of its readers, The Layers of the City is nevertheless
a fascinating and thought-provoking treatise on the effects of
the past on the present and the relationship of both, and their
languages, to our putative future."
Katherine England, The Advertiser (Adelaide), 26 June 1999
"The Layers of the City, a startling
postmodern meditation bristling with allusions to everybody..."
"While The Layers of the City is
reminiscent of European writers such as Perec, it's the kind of
thing a Parisian would be unlikely to write; you need to be from
the other side of the world to get this perspective, this sense
of the other."
Jane Sullivan, The Sunday Age, 23 May 1999
"Jach uses a varied textual palette to generate his effects;
however, it is the intensity of the poetic image that marks the
most striking moments, in particular his renderings of Parisian
street life.
"...aesthetically sophisticated
and structurally self-aware."
Anthony Macris, The Bulletin, August 24, 1999
"The closest one could come to describing the narrative is
that it evolves as some sort of giant and brilliantly coloured
scrapbook of fact and fiction, of snapshots and snippets of information,
of contemporary dialogue and historical recreation. About halfway
through, Jach's unusual style and method become addictive. It
will literally leave you light-headed. Not a bad thing."
No byline, The Sun-Herald, 30 May 1999
"This is an elegant and original novel that explores the
nexus between the past and the present as Jach peels back layers
of history in his quest to understand the modern city of Paris
and its beggars and bourgeoisie.
"Drawing on a wide range of sources
from Heraclitus to Marx, Freud, Rilke and Hitler's speeches, to
histories of the Romans in 5th century Provence, Jach meditates
on the complex patterns and structures that have wed the 'civilised'
to the barbarians for time immemorial."
Lisa Waller, The Australian Financial Review, July 10-11, 1999
"The narrator of Antoni Jach's The Layers of the City is
a postmodernist par excellence. He is also oppressed by history,
which he sees as a tumulus of bones on which modern cities are
built.
"The benzedrine racketing through
the underground city is replaced by a narcotic interlude in 5th
century Gaul."
Simon Hughes, from "The burden of history"
The Australian Financial Review Magazine, July 1999
"The Layers of the City is a meditation
on barbarism and civilisation."
Helen Elliott, from "Tales of the City" an interview with the author,
The Australian 8-9 May 1999
"In his novel The Layers of the City, Antoni Jach doesn't so much place his characters in a particular city as to make a city the main character of his book. It's an absorbing postmodernist meditation on the essence of a city and its origins. He takes us on a journey through the strata of a city -- physical, metaphysical and temporal -- in an attempt to capture the heart and soul of Paris."
Jason Steger, Literary editor of The Age chairing the session Tales of a City at the Melbourne Writers' Festival, 1999 and on the video Writers on Screen (Ripple Films) 1999
"A narrator fascinated by social history passes out in a Notre Dame crypt... only to awake in 5th century Provence with the local Roman garrison beseiged by barbarian horsemen. A fair flight of fancy on any day, granted, but Antoni Jach carries it off, simply, because he has read his history and knows how to use it... Unusual reading."
Graham Clark, Courier-Mail, Brisbane, 21 Aug. 1999
"The latter half of the book comprises a most evocative account of those [Roman] times...This is fascinating writing, one can see the dilemma facing the barbarians, can understand that of the Romans, and can even sense that an ending is in sight for this civilisation. The visions of sweeping oceans of barbarian savages overwhelming and obliterating all the Romans have achieved are depicted with awful realism. The author brings such scenes to life in vivid fashion... A satisfying book.
John D Pratt, The Catholic Weekly, Dec 26, 1999