After a pause of four years the long awaited new novel by Jáchym Topol is published. And what a book! As in his widely internationally praised novel Night Work the main character in Gargling Tar is a young boy, and also the fatal year 1968 has a prominent role in the book. And there the similarities end, because how different is this book from his predecessor. The only resemblance one may detect is with the grand novel Die Blechtrommel by Günther Grass.
The hero Ilja is an orphan on whose small world the stirring post-war history of Czechoslovakia is brutally imposed and Ilja has just one goal: to live. Because whatever one can say about the book, how to interpret it, above all it is about the most basic thing in life: to keep alive. So by far it is no parody as some critics claim. This book is dark, frightening sometimes. The events of 1968, the invasion and occupation of Czechoslovakia, in the second part of the book, is not the real theme. 1968 is merely a catalyst for Ilja's living on the edge. In the first part in the orphanage and in the second part in the limited outside world.
The best one can do is to have Topol himself characterize his book. To him it is like a computer game. In the first part one is looking and searching, trying out all kind of different doors, encountering different things. But then in the end you finally open the right door (or is it perhaps the fatal wrong one?) and hell breaks loose. Than in an increasing phantasmagoric world, you have to fight and kill your way to the apocalyptic end, because that is what a computer game is all about, you must not die. And like in a computer game, you wander off, take wrong turns, encounter new things, that may lead to new adventures, but they are not on the path you have to go. Topol let all these potent new motives simply die out. How courageous.
Gargling Tar is a book about survival at all means. It has the pace of an thundering armoured train, it rolls over you like a Tiger tank, just to leave you as a reader breathless and devastated behind.
