J.M. Sidorova is joining us today to talk about her novel, The Witch of Prague. Here’s the publisher’s description:
In Cold War Czechoslovakia, dyslexic teenager Alica escapes her troubled home by answering a newspaper ad. Instructed in typing, deportment, and political intrigue by a forbidding older woman with a long history of manipulating powerful men, she becomes a secretary in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, where she’s surrounded by surveillance, corruption, and rancid abuses.
When her mentor gifts her an ancient tapestry with mysterious properties, Alica finds herself haunted by dreams of a violent hunt and a mutilated forest. By day, her powers of manipulation are only growing—and around her, the currents of resistance are beginning to electrify the country. As her city teeters on the brink, Alica must uncover the power that only she can wield.
A work of magical realism set during the 1968 Prague Spring, The Witch of Prague is a book about bodily autonomy and the fight against authoritarian regimes everywhere.
What’s the author’s favorite bit?
In the last third of my novel, The Witch of Prague, we come across two poems written by some of the central characters. I had borrowed these poems from my much younger self (no license fee required!). One has these lines:
My love for you grows like a candle: I, a bee, build it with bits and pieces of wax.
It is lumpy and lopsided, handmade, and not at all perfect in shape.
Yet it towers—a many-hued pillar that sends beyond clouds, to heavens, its thin nerve of a wick.
In many ways, this is also how this book has been written. For as long as the main body of the story was around — and it has been a while — I’ve been bringing bits and pieces of this and that, and grafting them onto it. The result is a patchwork of many favorites — some are trusty old load-bearing scenes, some are vignettes of lore or history, some are references to books or movies, some are found objects, some are ideas or metaphors. Or songs, like (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction— apparently I can’t help it; The Witch is my second published novel but the first one also has a Rolling Stones song in it (a different one). All pieces are well connected to one another—I made sure of this, and in and of itself this is my favorite bit about the whole novel. And many of the pieces have stories behind them: how they got in and what happened next. Let me tell you a story of one of the pieces I had brought in. This piece is a literal piece of a larger piece that is the Unicorn tapestries. These historic—and enigmatic— tapestries (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unicorn_Tapestries) depict a hunt of the unicorn: in several panels, the beast is chased, killed, dragged to a castle but then somehow—lives there in a pen, on a leash? And then, maybe while in this pen, maybe earlier, the unicorn is seen next to a regal-looking Lady, who may or may not be freeing him — to be chased by the dogs? We can’t tell which it is because only two pieces of this particular panel, with the Lady and the Unicorn, have survived.
So it is this tapestry, with all its baggage, that I had brought into my novel. In it, the tapestry is a character in its own right and is endowed with a kind of feral magic, its powers and rules largely unknown. And it represents the whole complicated load of unicorn mythology, baked into which are the power asymmetries between the sexes: though this is not all the myth is about, it does, after all, instruct a hunter to “bait” a unicorn with a virgin in order to kill the beast. Oh, and the partial panel, the regal Lady freeing/not freeing the Unicorn, is intact in my book. One of the central characters in the book, Agata Riedl, a commanding old lady and the current owner of the fictional version of the tapestry who takes in the point-of-view character, Alica, as her apprentice and then heiress apparent, has her own take on this whole bait-the-unicorn idea. The virgin, she says, needs to get her agency back and claim the unicorn for herself, rather than letting the king and his hunters take the spoils. She instructs Alica to do just that to the Cold War era communist Czechoslovakia version of hunters and kings, eventually revealing that this instruction is meant not just metaphorically, but also quite literally: Agata had in fact made the tapestry her magical helper that carried her through the World War II and three regime changes.
Now, as the story progresses, Alica and I, the author, we kept having our doubts. Alica formulates this as: the Lady on the Lady and the Unicorn panel just does not look like she is or ever was unicorn bait (“bait-girl” is Alica’s name for her). And this “claiming the unicorn for herself,” is this really what she is doing when she lets the hounds pounce on him?” But if so, who is the bait-girl? Where in the tapestries is she?
She’s nowhere to be seen.
Well, I, the author, made a major plot twist out of this lingering doubt. Then, after the manuscript was written and rewritten, and with the final draft nearing completion, I finally bought myself a definitive 1976 study of the Unicorn tapestries by Margaret B. Freeman, then the curator of the Cloisters (where the tapestries are displayed), which has a set of high quality images of the tapestries. And then I also visited the Cloisters of the Met, at long last. You see, before I was only staring at various internet images (goes to show!). But now I saw the fragmented panel up close. And I found my bait-girl.
Of her, only part of the sleeve and fingers of her hand remain in the surviving piece. Can you find them in the picture? The fingers are woven into the mane of the unicorn’s neck, they are as white as the mane and so are hard to notice. The sleeve, since it’s behind the Unicorn’s neck, can be easily missed. But now that I see these details, it really seems like the girl is about to hug the unicorn and nudge him away from the Lady. Naturally, after I saw the girl, Alica saw her too, all of her. But need I tell you that the novel’s narrative, written long before this discovery, had already been leading us to this point? The image, finally discerned, actually caught up with the story. How cool and magical is that!
| The Lady and the Unicorn.This file was donated to Wikimedia Commons as part of a project by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=60891351 |
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BIO:
J.M. Sidorova’s one personality is a writer of fiction that tends to be speculative and cross-genre. This personality is a 2009 Clarion West workshop graduate, whose fiction appeared in Clarkesworld, Asimov’s, and other venues. Her debut novel The Age of Ice (Simon & Schuster), two parts history, one part magic realism, was featured in Locus Magazine’s recommended reading list, and received an honorable mention on Tor.com’s best fiction of 2013 list. The other personality has a Ph.D. in molecular genetics and spends her days in the lab doing biomedical science. Both claim that the other personality has undue influence on their writing styles.
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