Three Plastic Rooms by Petra Hůlová is the story of an aging prostitute and her relationship with her own body, a novel rendered from Czech into hauntingly poetic English by Alex Zucker. Oh, my goodness. How can there exist a novel that is at once so open to beauty and yet in which every sentence is some new shocker? Here you go. This is that book. It’s the kind of book that nineteen out of twenty readers will say is too upsetting to love, or maybe even to finish, and the twentieth person will say "this book changed my life" or maybe: "this book convinces me that we are nowhere near the end as a species of exploring all the ways human language can be called upon to express new things."

As I write this, there has not been a single review of the novel on Amazon, which is surprising. It seems the book that would make people angry enough to write about it. Let’s see. It’s the kind of book that you can open on any page and be unbelievably disturbed. Let me try now:

the true mumsyfuckers have enough of that little drama at home, and the fuckshop, a quiet backwater of kissed knees, offers a gulf of solace, because what an orgasm means to these men’s wives was drilled into their heads by all those sex scene disasters you see at the multiplex, which whenever they happen my sticker-inner farts with laughter in my seat, and I would only be willing to moan during them, as I said, for the enjoyment of a man all my very own, so that sitting there in the seat next to me, in the dark, he would get an urge to stroke himself, or maybe just enjoy my sights, or maybe all of me, or, sigh, even love me.

I'm amazed this writing, for the way the harshness of the language resolves suddenly into vulnerability and poetry at the end of this paragraph...and also, damn, I'm amazed by translator Alex Zucker that he has done such an amazing job making this writing accessible to me.

Wonderful. Harsh and nearly unreadable at times but I'm so glad to have read it. ( )