Says Jáchym Topol: “the tongue I use is one of Czechs, of Slavs, of slaves, of onetime slaves to Germans and Russians, and it’s a dog’s tongue. . . . It’s a tongue that often had to be spoken only in whispers.� Fortunately, that constraint no longer applies. This first novel, a fantasia of the Czech Republic after the Velvet Revolution, is anything but quiet. It blusters and wails, and its keening is often songlike. Its characters, who cobble together an informal syndicate in an attempt to make sense of their new freedom, are reminiscent of the revolutionaries in Vollmann’s You Bright and Risen Angels, and its dreamy unreality recalls Bulgakov, but the presiding deity here is Anthony Burgess. As in A Clockwork Orange, Topol’s “accelerated city-speak� employs countless neologisms and portmanteaux to dazzle readers and depict a uniquely unfamiliar environment. While occasional infelicities arise, as when the bedeviled translator must somehow render rural Bohemian dialect and Laotian-accented Czech into English, the overall effect is a healthy disorientation that mimics the sensation of living through flux. The rapidity of these changes in Prague produces the feeling in Potok, the twentysomething narrator, of living outside of history and time; one minor by-product is that he sees the children around him as part of a completely different generation, subject to sometimes pernicious new influences. Shops that once held teddy bears now stock plastic, western-style “Nuclear Asexual Homonucleoids� that, in Topol’s private symbolism, are referred to as “toyfils� (homonymous for devil in German, Teufel). Given the American media’s current fascination with kid culture, Potok’s unease may ring particularly true for Gen-Xers who feel they’ve been supplanted by their younger siblings, but Topol’s dynamic voice will exhilarate anyone who can still be swept away by a torrent of words.