Paul, the protagonist of Michal Ajvaz's novel Lucemburská zahrada The Garden of Luxembourg, has his life upended by a single typo. An accidental combination of letters brings Paul in contact with the ...mysterious Yggur language that exerts an inexorable transformative power. This article demonstrates how Ajvaz has engineered Yggur to wield its power over Paul, thereby showing the reader that potent messages can be embedded in seemingly random patterns. I reveal that Yggur is a "real" language and that it is possible to interpret it, despite the obvious (and probably intentional) shortcomings of the documentation presented by the author. I argue that further important factors in the spell of Yggur are the facts that it is an apriori constructed language (not transparently derived from any known language) and that it is, with a few minor exceptions, typologically normative for a human language. This article details the genius of Ajvaz's creation and addresses the reason why the author went to such pains to create something that most readers will never bother to make sense of.
This is a companion piece to Laura Janda's article in the same volume. Using some of the rich and varied literary and philosophical allusions in Lucemburská zahrada (e.g. Plotinus, Hölderlin, Kitaro, ...Husserl, de Mandiargues, Ladislav Klima), as well as his personal correspondence with Michal Ajvaz from 2017-18, the author attempts to explain why the Yggur language was invented and what it is doing in the novel. Also included are the reasons as to why this explanation can only be of limited nature.
WHAT WILL THE TOP-TEN CZECH NOVELS of the next decade look like? Of course one can only speculate, but I would guess that the last two features I indicated as characteristic of Czech fiction from ...1990 to 2002 (i.e., the heightened role of anthropology and sociology in fiction, and the eager reception of debuts by literary outsiders) will also be applicable to many of the most talkedabout Czech books of the next several years.
