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HalloweenJack

I've found myself with a lot of free time lately and started shifting through some old files I have. I came across this and remembered it was something I started a while back. I found some notes I had written down for it too so I have an idea of what I planned to do it.

This is just what I had for starters and I'd appreciate some feedback on it.

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The room was horrible. It had beige wallpaper with flashy grey stripes running down it every few centimetres. It was truly ugly. The room was pretty much a living room-cum-kitchen with a couch-cum-bed thrown in. All the cupboards had that plasticky-wood finish, as did the counter. The telly was about thirty years old, again with a wood panel finish. The couch was a deep brown and the carpet was a hideously dark green. Interior design was not this landlord’s strength. There was one big window with a decent view of the city, you could see all the way up to the castle. That was the one good point of the room and it was probably what sold the place and made you overlook the fact that you were paying €300 a month to live in a 1970’s living room.

There was a cool, black-and-white French film poster from the 50’s which also piqued my interest. It was called Le soleil d’hiver. I'd never saw or heard of it before. The poster had a massive car, in that typical 40’s/50’s style with the big silver grille at the front and perfectly round headlights that cast a blinding light. On both sides of the car, you could see the profiles of two people. One was a detective-type with a wide-brimmed hat and a smart suit. He was facing away. The shadow from the hat hung over his face and a puff of smoke could be seen twirling upwards. On the other side was a sultry woman in a flowing dress with a beautiful face and curly long hair. She had a hard stare and her face was fixed somewhere between a frown and a smile, the look you’d associate with a girl that doesn’t fall for your bull**** when you’re trying to chat her up.

It was fairly easy to make out the story. It looked like a French attempt at a film noir. Apparently, the film was very popular in the Czech Republic because the femme fatale in the film was Czech, something about her trying to escape from the Communists after the Second World War.

The whole room was probably eight metres squared. The bathroom was in the hall with the washing machines and was shared with whoever lived in the room across the hall. Jirka was his name but we rarely spoke to each other. He didn’t speak much English and my Czech was woeful. We got by through a patois of English, Czech and German, which seemed to be our strongest common language, though I had only got as far as higher level Leaving Cert so I don’t know how I managed it. He was tall, well over six feet, and skinny. He had a pitch black afro, a thick, fuzzy beard and wore thick-framed black glasses to match. He was a barman but I only knew that because I’d see him behind the bar in the place he worked. It was just down the street so he had it pretty handy. He never seemed to be around, though. Very rarely I’d hear some noises coming from his room, usually late at night or early in the morning but nothing during the day.

The landlord was a jolly, middle-aged man. He was also called Jirka. After a while I took to calling him Jirka 1 and the guy across the hall Jirka 2. Jirka 1 had a massive, round belly and arms thick with muscle and a pudgy, red face. When I first met him, he was wearing a bright blue short-sleeved shirt with a few buttons open, exposing the top of his grey-haired chest, at odds with his brown-haired head. He had a hairstyle that reminded me of a late 60’s John Lennon, wavy and flowing but not very long. He had short, scrawny legs which he showed off by wearing olive shorts. He spoke perfect English. I was impressed but he always wanted me to speak Czech, to help me improve. It didn’t work.

I’d found his ad online. He was looking for a language teacher to live there. His logic was that it was a well-paid job and the person would be responsible and reliable, being a teacher. How he ended up with Jirka 2 then, I don’t know. Jirka 1 would drop by once a month to collect the rent, usually on the first Friday at exactly two minutes past six. He explained that he left his flat at six on the dot and it took him two minutes to make it down the stairs and to open the door to the hall and that he’d always come straight to my room first.

So how did I end up in this place? Well, I’d arrived in Prague four days earlier with a teaching job lined up. The flat-hunting was difficult. Countless times I would tell an estate agent that I was looking for a place near the city centre for under €400 and I was always told that is impossible. I was beginning to get desperate so I started looking at private ads and found that the estate agents were talking utter ****e. You could find cheaper places, even in a frenzied rush, as I was.

I remember one particular estate agent, called Zbynek, who was hounding me to take one place he’d shown me. It was ok, not far from the place I eventually went with but at €500, it was too expensive. I told him to get back to me if the price would drop and that I’d keep looking for a place under €400. He angrily told me it was impossible and then dropped the bombshell that a English couple who were both teachers were coming to look at the place later on that day. He said it was now or never. I told him I’d take the risk and continue looking around. The next day, he told me he’d got a reduction, that the landlay would rent it for €450 but I said no again. Again, he told me I was being foolish and wouldn’t find anything under €400. That same day I found my place for €300. A few days after, he rang me again, telling me he’d talked the landlady down to €400 but that was the final offer. I told him I’d already found something and he quickly congratulated me before hanging up.

The flat I found on my own was in a good place, south of the city centre, near the Budějovicka metro. It was a nice place, quiet and peaceful. Sometimes, it felt like you were stuck in the 1960’s. All the buildings had a distinctive look that placed it back fifty years or so. The vast majority of locals were Czech, an oddity in the city centre. I liked that. Although I was crap at Czech and didn’t plan on staying for a very long time, I still wanted to feel like I was living in a foreign place, which could easily be avoided in a place like Prague with the massive foreign population.

I chose Prague because I wanted something different. I’d finished college in 2011, saw how the country was going and went for a TEFL course. Got through that and started firing off applications for jobs in places all around the EU. The first decent one to get back to me was in Prague so I took it.
I had done Erasmus in France, in a place called Montpellier for a year. That was what gave me the desire to live outside Ireland when I finished college. I had tried to get a job in France but it was tougher than getting one in the Czech Republic.

So Prague it was. I was enthusiastic and excited. Prague was a cool place, off the beaten track but on the radar. It made a lot of people say “that’s cool” when I’d told them I was heading there. There was a massive foreign community there, something I’d later come to value greatly.

I started off by meeting people through playing football in Letna Park, going to expat events in various bars around the city and hanging out with people at work, usually they were people who were seasoned Praguers. They’d been there a bit and knew enough about the place to keep themselves happy.

They fell into a few different groups: there were the true-foreigners who had no intent of breaking into Czech culture and just wanted to tell people they were living in a foreign country when the reality was they travelled in an expat-lined bubble; there were the foreigners who wanted to meet Czech people and become a part of Czech culture and did, usually through a one-night stand-turned-relationship but in reality fell into a group of Czech people who spoke near-perfect English and were more interested in learning about foreign cultures; and there were the foreigners who actually broke into Czech society and happily did so. These were few and far between, however, and were generally nutcases, the criteria needed for a foreigner who wants to live their entire life in the Czech Republic.

heathledgerlove

First paragraph is good in terms of description but gets a little repetitive; possibly too many of the sentences start with “the” or “it” - fine for descriptive purposes, if this is the kind of straight-talking fiction you are aiming for. Best line in this section is “Interior design was not this landlord's strength” - in fact it suffices as a (funny!) summery of the whole section. However if the specific look of the room is of importance – lay on.

Introducing the two characters called Jirka (good name by the way, unusual, catches the interest) by way of describing their differences, jobs, acquaintance with the narrator – I like how you've done this, throwing in some particularly funny or strange detail (rather like Dickens always does) to make them more memorable. Jirka 2 seems like a malevolent figure - an antagonist, or a catalyst to some kind of future trouble for the protagonist? And the landlord-Jirka I'm gathering is a friend, or at least some way of expressing the protagonist's (he has a name?) sociability. Assume we'll be interacting with them at some stage?

In my opinion the whole paragraph with the story of Zbynek is superfluous and – unless flat-hunting plays an integral role to your story entire – rather long and detailed. It might be enough to express in a punchier line or two that finding a place to live was difficult.

Your next section, dealing with the abridged history of the narrator's post-college career: whilst this is surly relevant in terms of the reader's familiarity with him (I assume him) and for character-building, perhaps you could again tell the story more anecdotally, not merely listing chronologically what he did that led him to end up in Prague.

The piece certainly picks up at the end; you are clearly eager to and well able to describe the multifaceted culture of the city, in terms of the different people you are likely to meet and who will enrich the experience – of Prague, and of your work.

Finally, I would just add something that jumps out at me – you intend this to be in the colloquial voice? I mention only because several words and phrases you chose eg, “massive”, “cool” “talking utter s****” evoke a particular kind of characterization, I'm getting Ross O'Carroll-Kelly vibes. If this is a deliberate conceit then work away.

Very engaging stuff. Please continue! I'm intrigued. Anything with a newcomer to a European city puts me in mind of John Irving; though I know he dealt mainly with Vienna.

HalloweenJack

Thanks for the feedback, I really appreciate you taking them to read and have a think about it.

With the voice, I do a lot of writing that's from the main character's POV and for me, it just feels natural and more real to write the way that person would think.

I had planned for the poster to be important later on and also the interaction with Jirka 2 to be there later on.

heathledgerlove

HalloweenJack wrote: »

Thanks for the feedback, I really appreciate you taking them to read and have a think about it.

With the voice, I do a lot of writing that's from the main character's POV and for me, it just feels natural and more real to write the way that person would think.

I had planned for the poster to be important later on and also the interaction with Jirka 2 to be there later on.

Great foreshadowing so !

I do all first-person subjective voice too, it's dead easy to write that way I feel. Keep at it!