A Trip to the Train Station is Topol’s the first prose work. Previously, as a member of the Czech underground under the repressive communist regime in the 1980s, he wrote mostly poems and song lyrics, including for his younger brother Filip Topol’s band. In 1993 this short story appeared in the literary magazine Revolver Revue, of which Topol was a founding member, and in 1995 it was published in book form along with the English translation. This first prose by Topol already contains the stylistic features of his later work, such as the use of poetic language interspersed with colloquialisms. Also that he as a writer is not explanatory, but gives the reader the freedom to form his own images and idea. This also applies to the structure of the story as a series of impressions on a particular day, through which he captures life shortly after Czechoslovakia regains its freedom and tries to establish a democracy.

“The reader will have a unique opportunity to smell the very sovereign beginnings of a writer unusually sophisticated in style and genre for our region; eighteen years after the first publication and twenty two years after the fall of the communist regime, his narrative has taken on new – and it must be said very interesting – connotations.”

— Nekultura

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