Customer Reviews

Prague: A Traveler's Literary Companion (Traveler's Literary Companions)

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As we prepared for our trip to Prague, I ordered this book from Amazon.com but didn't get a chance to read until we actually got there. What a treasure! Each piece made some landmark or moment of history come more vividly alive than any of the standard guidebooks could possibly provide. The division of the book into corresponding areas of the city was a great idea.I always look to literature to gain insight into travel destinations. No single book has ever done a better job than this one.

Excellent collection of pieces from obscure writers and celebrated Czech authors. The book is divided into sections for each part of the city (Old Town, Mala Strana, etc.). I've lived in Prague before and it was so much fun following each author around the city again. I recommend this book for anyone enchanted by the idea of Prague or for those who miss it and want to spend some time there with a bunch of amazing tour guides.

This book was published in 1995 and contained 24 works by 21 authors. There were 12 short stories, 6 excerpts from novels, 4 essays and 2 excerpts from autobiographies.

The oldest authors were Jan Neruda (1834-1891), Alois Jirásek (1851-1930) and Gustav Meyrink (1863-1932). The youngest were Daniela Hodrová (1946-), Michal Ajvaz (1949-) and Jáchym Topol (1962-). Others included Jaroslav Hacek, Kafka, Egon Erwin Kisch, Karel Capek, Jirí Weil, Bohumil Hrabal, Ivan Divis, Josef Skvorecky, Ota Pavel and Ivan Klíma. Milan Kundera was omitted because he wasn't considered a Prague author, and what was described as a classic novel of the pre-1968 Communist era, Summer in Prague, by Zdena Salivarová, was called too densely written to excerpt. Most of the authors were translated from Czech; Meyrink, Kafka and Kisch were from German. Of all the writers, two were women.

The pieces ranged from the 1880s (Neruda) to the 1990s, usually with 1-2 works for each decade. For the 1930s, nothing was included. One-quarter of the pieces were from the 1990s (by Divis, Skvorecky, Klíma, Hodrová, Ajvaz and Topol). These covered the 1968 Soviet invasion, President Clinton's visit to Prague, the spirit of the city through the centuries, childhood memories and the Velvet Revolution, freedom and the shift to capitalism.

As an essay noted, for centuries "there was scarcely a war in Europe that did not affect the Czech state." History was in the background of a number of the works, particularly the essays and excerpts from autobiographies: religious wars of the Renaissance, the Nazi occupation, the Communist takeover in 1948, the 1968 invasion, the Velvet Revolution and after. For this reader, the most insightful of the essays was Klíma's "The Spirit of Prague."

In the works by Meyrink, various characters from the city's history, real and legendary, put in brief appearances: Rudolf II, the Golem, John Dee and Edward Kelley. Other stories were set around places like Prague Castle, the Old Town Clock, Wenceslas Square, the Charles Bridge, a train station, a concert hall, a ritzy hotel, a local pub, a café and a nightclub. Something from the turn of the century described the ringing of church bells across the city, with the bells of long-abolished churches seeming to blend in, and imagined the buildings and people reverting to the Middle Ages.

There was a tale derived from the Renaissance period, and the reworking in 1940 of an inspirational legend, following the Nazi takeover. There was a cynically funny story by Hacek about a man mistaken for a suicide, and a tale of detection by Capek involving clues from a receipt that led from victim to murderer. An excerpt from a novel by Hrabal described the atmosphere behind the scenes at a luxury hotel. A piece by Kisch revealed with black humor a washerwoman's story after her son was charged with murder, but also contained much sympathy. In the story by Topol, set in the 1990s, a narrator mused on freedom and post-Communist realities as he walked through a train station from an earlier time. This work was gritty, dark and funny and stylistically among the most interesting.

For this reader, the slightest and least interesting pieces were the ones by Kafka -- an early, especially murky one -- Neruda -- about a man trying at great length to get rid of straw from an old mattress -- and Ajvaz -- about various characters in a contemporary nightclub. If anything was missed in this collection of much history, atmosphere and humor, it was maybe something touching on love between people.

Other recent collections of Czech writers include Daylight in the Nightclub Inferno: Czech Fiction from the Post-Kundera Generation (1997) and This Side of Reality: Modern Czech Writing (1996).

Excerpts:

"For me, the material and spiritual center of the city is a bridge . . . . The almost seven-hundred-year-old stone bridge joining the river's west bank with the east as it were symbolizes the place of this city in Europe, the two halves of which have been seeking each other out at the very least since the bridge's foundations were laid."

"A history full of uprisings and reversals, occupations, liberations, betrayals, and new occupants enters the life of people and cities as a burden, as a constant reminder of life's uncertainties . . . . they are always tearing down monuments to those who symbolized the most recent epoch (monuments to the emperors and to the first, second, and now even the fourth president, monuments raised to honor conquerors). As well, streets are constantly being renamed. There are places in Prague that have had a change of name five times in this century alone . . . . Street signs with new names testify to an attempt to purge the city of something it cannot be purged of -- its own past, its own history, a history that seems too great a burden to bear."

"I had a moment when I might have jumped on the tank and embraced the man on the turret and said to him 'Friend and brother! In the name of Christ! You're not doing a good thing, you're doing a bad thing! Love thine enemy!' It was that mystical moment that is always with us, everywhere, but . . . the moment passed, ebbed away, and once more we were those old, sinful, drunken men . . . and we turned and we went nowhere, away . . . helpless and utterly powerless."

"So I felt good in the Reduta, with the president of a great democracy that I had always sworn by, and the Czech president, surrounded by jazzmen, who had triumphed so magnificently over forty years of an obscurantism that had once even tried to ban the saxophone."

"The city peeled off the stern and gloomy face, the mask of rotting bolshevism, and replaced it with a thousand others . . . no more tank parades, just Punch and Judy shows for sons and daughters from well-to-do families with fabulous passports who came to Eastern Europe to go wild . . . . Sooner or later every lunatic with a couple of bucks, a worldview, and a vision set down in this city and founded organizations or movements or newspapers, or pulled into town with never-ending cables wrapped round their waist for the new TV, something you can look at for a change, creating CULTURE . . . and when the money ran out, they vanished. The city and its speculators sucked them up like a sponge."

"The Middle Ages came alive in streets that narrowed in the darkness, pressing the rows of silent houses together. Night gave the city back its former shape and, for an instant, transformed the memory of its ancient glory into reality . . . His eyes took in all that so many before him had seen, so many lives from long lost times. He felt their disembodied being on the damp, mildewed walls. He sensed their touch adhering to the stones, the doors and windows. He merged his being with the spirits of those dead, with the rhythm of their breath. He called them forth and brought them back to life, though nothing remained of them now but the anonymous dust a gale will lift and scatter throughout the city, coating the paving stones, the roofs, gathering in the corners."

"For a person to bear the burden of his own destiny, and a nation the burden of its own history, patience and perseverance are necessary. A city too must have these qualities . . . . If Prague is still standing, and has not yet lost its allure or its beauty, it is because its very stones, like its people, have expressed their patient perseverance."