Customer Reviews

A Romantic Education

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I first read Patricia Hampl's I Could Tell You Stories when I took a 1st person essay writing class, and all of us in the class became instant fans. Her book provoked endless discussions about the reliability (or Unreliability) of memory and the role it plays in memoir writing. Hampl's A Romantic Education allows us to continue following her down her chosen path as she returns to Prague in search of her heritage during the gray pall of socialism. This edition of A Romantic Education is a reissue following the Velvet Revolution and is full of richly nuanced detail that we have come to expect from Hampl. It's an elegant piece of writing that allows us to taste and dabble in the trickling stream of history running beneath the surface of the everlasting riddle of personal memory.

Elegant, meditative, and special, Patrica Hampl's memoir of growing up in St. Paul and visiting her ancestral home of Prague deservedly won her a Macarthur genius grant, and remains a classic of its genre. When it was published in the early 80s, the gorgeous Bohemian captial of Prague was sheltered from the American line of vision by the Iron Curtain, and much less familiar to American readers than it is today; Hampl's book details her trip in the 70s to that loveliest of cities to visit her family's origins and learn something about her place in the world. But the book is also a beautiful meditation on another exceptionally romantic, and often still neglected, city, Hampl's hometown of St. Paul, Minnesota. Stunningly situated on the high bluffs overlooking a chasmic portion of the Mississippi, the home of F. Scott Fitzgerald and the Empire Builder James J. Hill, St. Paul has declined in cultural significance over the decades, overshadowed by its younger and more prosperous twin city across the river. But Hampl lovingly evokes what it was like to live in this atmospheric city of decaying Victorian mansions overlooking the downtown from the heights of Summit Avenue, both as a grandchild of Czech immigrants working as servants for the enmansed and as a young woman striking out as a student and a writer. It's an unusual, romantically-staurated memoir.

I had read the 1981 edition of A ROMANTIC EDUCATION previously and found it a fabulous memoir, written with great sensitivity and elegance. I bought the newer edition because I wanted to read the added Afterword, describing Hampl's visits to the post-communist Czech lands. As a native Czech (a dual citizen of the US and the Czech Republic) and a memoirist, I was curious to read how her stories, her feelings, and her impressions matched up with those I had, returning to my native land after 40-plus years in exile. When I first came, after the Velvet Revolution, I had mixed feelings about people who had been, or whom I had suspected of having been, members of the Communist Party. After all, my parents and I had to escape on foot across the border from the Reds, and these people had stayed. Now, some 22 years after the Velvet Revolution, it was Ms. Hampl who expressed my feelings more eloquently and insightfully than I've been able to do in my own writing. She wrote:

"...I understood finally that I had no business judging any of it or any of them... The Czechs may want to be part of 'the West,' but they know the West -- me with my blue American passport -- can't be part of their tangled history, their inner family. I may have 'my Mala Strana apartment,' but I'm forever a tourist on the bridge, dazzled by the scene."

My conclusion as well -- but she said it so much better! A terrific book!

Being of eastern European descent, I found Hampl's book revealing and intriguing as it spoke of what my grandparents often alluded to when referring to "the old country."
I felt myself travelling with her, trying to find out something, anything, about my roots.