Michael J. Rowland The Unnameable Object

Annotation

The Unnameable Object is an epic experiment in collective memory and literary excess. Subtitled “100 Prague Cantos,” it assembles fragments of memoir, fiction, satire, and hallucination into a polyphonic chronicle of Prague’s literary underground. At once comic and elegiac, the book moves through bars, festivals, squats, and lecture halls, capturing the unruly lives of poets, musicians, and misfits who have made the city their stage. Its prose is by turns lyrical and abrasive, channeling Joycean invention, Woolfian drift, and Sex Pistols irreverence, while invoking the ghosts of Eliot, Ginsberg, and the Prague surrealists. This is not a linear narrative but a carnival of voices, a dérive through decades of Central European counterculture. Characters come and go—half-fictional, half-remembered—while Prague itself emerges as the book’s true protagonist: haunted, absurd, intoxicating, and unnameable. A testament and a provocation, The Unnameable Object is both archive and experiment, a novel that insists literature is inseparable from friendship, rebellion, and the chaotic vitality of lived life.