Winner of the Carl Sandburg Award for nonfiction.
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Amazon.com Review
Jan Novak took his family to Prague for a year, and one of the results is this delightful book. Casting an ironic eye on the country in which he grew, Novak remembers the Iron Curtain country of his childhood and observes the farcical contradictions of post-Communist Prague. Witty, astute, erudite, and willing to share his humiliations for the sake of honesty and a good story, Novak touches on Prague lore (the Jewish golem, the clockmaker whose eyes were poked out by a jealous king), Prague history (including the Velvet Revolution martyr who didn't exist), and the Prague of 1992, where an encounter with a pickpocket on Charles Bridge marks the moment they stop being tourists and Prague becomes home. Insightful and very funny, Commies, Crooks, Gypsies, Spooks, & Poets is for anyone who's ever, or never, been to Prague.
From Publishers Weekly
Prague, when Novak got there in July 1992, was aswarm with pickpockets, drug addicts, bohemian Americans and returning Czech emigres like himself. Speculators, real estate sharpies, advertising gurus, porno pushers and ministers with blatant conflicts of interest were making fortunes. Stressed out by the end of communism, Prague residents coped with bureaucracy, corruption and a head-lice epidemic while ferreting out "spooks" (former state security agents) and plainclothes informers. Novak, a Chicago-based American novelist, was born in Czechoslovakia in 1953 and spent his first 16 years there. The recent year he spent in Prague with his Czech-born wife and their two children yielded this pungent, irreverent look at a society struggling toward rebirth.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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4.0 out of 5 stars
More an insider's view than a travelogue,
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This review is from: Commies, Crooks, Gypsies, Spooks & Poets: Thirteen Books of Prague in the Year of the Great Lice Epidemic (Hardcover)
Novak's strength lies in his ability to choose the right anecdote for his message. In a few pages about a Skoda car dealer, for example, he tells you much more about post-communist economics, Czech character, and the slippery negotiations needed as an Eastern bloc society adapts the mannerisms of the West. As a returned emigre, he's in the ideal position to contrast his decades in Chicago with his decades in a provincial town in the Czech republic. His bilingual skills allow him to be a stealth Czech--his attitude has become American, but his mother tongue lets him "spy" on how his compatriots "really" act out of earshot of tourists. While I would have liked more on how his wife (also Czech-born) fared with him on his year in Prague, or how he worked with Milos Forman on the director's "auto"biography, this book does capture fluidly in two hundred easy-to-read pages what denser tomes and more superficial visitor's accounts labor to convey. Two examples from the book: "In writing this book, I took heart from the fact that memory itself is a kind of an imagination." That is, Novak in short chapters within the book, and then briefer vignettes, in a mosaic fashion pieces together his impressions of his own hometown, his friends, his stay in Prague, and his encounters on a daily basis to build up undramatically the shifts in his own life and that of his homeland. Unassuming, Novak gives a personal perspective without getting wrapped up in his own self-importance. After a failed interview with the Prague-based outpost of Reader's Digest, Novak reflects: "the Number One Print Publication in the Free World banged on the Bell of Liberty out front while peeping through the keyhole out back, and maybe what it finally boiled down to was this: in the West, people often weren't what they said they were, while in the post-Communist East, in a more forgivable and tragic way, people often weren't what they thought they were." Novak's own humility and Everyman stance shows here, as well as his rather annoying tendency to Capitalize Important Archetypes or Stereotypes to Make a Point. He does this throughout the text to draw together many of his disparate themes, and his ablility to do this succeeds in small portions (he gives a great chapter on Prague's legendary past) but this distracts over the course of the book. My only other caveat: this will teach you little (except for that chapter) about Prague itself; it's more a study of the current (as of 1992) Czech psyche as found mostly in Prague than a tour through the nation or an introduction to recent history or culture. Best read for those who have a grounding in the context already, and who wish to delve deeper than guidebooks or visitor's impressions.
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