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A novel of startling scope and ambition, Prague depicts an on purpose lost Lost Generation as it follows five American expats who come to Budapest in the early 1990s to seek their fortune. They harbor the vague suspicion that their counterparts in Prague have it better, but still they hope to find adventure, inspiration, a gold rush, or history in the making.
ReviewIn Prague, Arthur Phillips's sparkling, Kundera-flavored debut, five young Americans converge in Budapest in the early 1990s. Most are there by chance, like businessman Charles Gabor, whose parents were Hungarian. But one of them, John Price, has the more novelistic motivation of lost love. He is following his older brother, Scott, intent on achieving an intimacy that Scott, a language teacher and health enthusiast, is just as intently attempting to escape. The romantic hero of this unsentimental novel, John Price lives like an expatriate of the 1920s. He longs for experience (and more or less stumbles into a writing occupation for an English language paper), but even more so for the great, obliterating love that takes the form of the perky assistant Emily Oliver. Mark Payton, a scholar of nostalgia whose perceptivities are touched with mysticism, seems often times to speak for the author, even in his scarcely repressed desire for John Price. For who would not love the good and unaffected, in the confusion, opportunism, and sarcasm that characterize fin-de-siècle Europe? Phillips's five seekers are like mirrors that reflect Budapest at dissimilar angles, and that imperfectly--but wonderfully--point toward the unattainable city: the glittering, distant Prague. --Regina Marler From Publishers WeeklyEverything with regards to this dazzling original novel is utterly original, including the title: it's with regards to a group of young American (and one Canadian) expatriates living in Budapest in 1990, just after the Communist empire has collapsed, and the point of "Prague" is that it's the place every one would rather be, except they have all someways settled for Budapest as second best to their idealized Central European city.The author's way of bringing his five central characters onstage is likewise devilishly clever. They are playing a game developed by Charles Gabor, the only one with a Hungarian background called Sincerity, in which scores are made by telling convincing lies and by seeing through the lies of others. This serves at once to introduce these characters and allows the author to play with their sense of themselves. There is sophisticated, devious Charles, working for a New York investment company seeking newly privatized Hungarian businesses to invest in; Mark, a Canadian intellectual obsessed with the constituents of nostalgia (and finding Budapest a rich repository); John, who writes a mordant column on the clashes of the old world and the new for the English-language BudapesToday; John's older brother, Scott, who despises him; and Emily, an evident innocent from Nebraska who works at the U.S. Embassy. At the heart of the story is Charles's undertake to take over a venerable Hungarian publishing company, whose history is brilliantly sketched and whose aged scion, Imre Horvath, is a quintessential Central European survivor. John nurses a hopeless passion for Emily, becomes involved with a bald-headed collage artisan and listens, enchanted, to the tales of an elderly pianist in the group's favored jazz club. Mark disappears, Scott decamps and the publishing caper ends in disillusionment.But what happens in this novel is not almost so indispensable as Phillips's wondrous perceive Budapest's look, style and ethos, and his from time to time sympathetic, many times scathing view of the Western interlopers. His writing is swift, often poetic, unerringly precise with voices and subtle details of time, place and weather. This novel is so finish a distillation of it is theme and characters that it leaves a reader marveling how on world Phillips may follow it up.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc. From Library JournalJust bumped up to June, this debut is getting lavish treatment that seems to be deserved. It's in truth set in Budapest in the early 1990s, as young Westerners seek to make their mark in a city haunted by the 20th century's tragedies.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc. |
Most helpful client reviews 117 of 130 people found the following review helpful.
 ...or, The Mysteries of Budapest
By Karl Miller
I hadn't heard of Arthur Phillips before I begun reading Prague, but by page 6, I felt I had read 50 other books by him. Alienated youth, joined by a sense of ennui in a habitat not their own...sound familiar? Then, by page 20 I realized that this was, indeed, something in an outstanding manner fresh. And fabulously well written.
Don't open this story looking for a party in Prague itself, for the city plainly plays Emerald City to Budapest's Oz. The 5 main characters of Phillips books are for a limitless time looking toward Prague while chasing money, love, and in one interesting case family through Budapest in the early 1990's. There isn't a whole lot at primary to like regarding Emily, Scott, his brother John, Mark and Charles - but as their adventures roll along the pages, it is humor that makes these characters endearing.
Phillips use of the English language is awe-inspiring. It's clear that he recognizes the kudos showered upon Michael Chabon for taking time to perfective language and idioms in his storytelling. I kept thinking of Chabon's "The Mysteries Of Pittsburgh" while reading this book, and if you are a fan, you will primarily take delight in Phillip's storytelling skills.
I've read this type story so a good deal of times over the years (Bright Lights, Big City, Less Than Zero, The Secret History are less worthy members of this literary club). When I finished Prague, I felt like I genuinely cared when it comes to not only the outcome, but the characters themselves. That's difficult to pull off in a novel when it comes to self-absorbed, capital-hungry Gen X'ers, but Phillips does a great occupation in achieving this.
24 of 26 humans found the following review helpful.
Best book I read last year
By Jennifer Barger
Okay, I confess it...I'm mainly writing this review to drag the stars on Prague up. Simply put, it's a stunner...a tour de strength that seems to capture a place and time (1990s Eastern Europe) as well as the sort of young Americans who gathered there. It was the best thing I read last year, and I've commended it to every one I know.
It seems ludicrous to me that galore of the reviewers demand that the characters all be likeable. These characters are complex, and yes, a lot of of them aren't that likeable. But this is an elegiac, bittersweet look at twenthysomething expats in a town going through a seismic change. The characters are going through big changes, too, and that isn't always when folks are at their student-council president best. But who wants to read regarding humans like that anyway? (And don't get me started on folks who are bothered that this is with regards to the realities of Budapest and dreams of Prague.)
Yep, a heap of of these characters trample the locals and the system. Others, like the F. Scott Fitzgerald-ish John Price, find inspiration and a lot of cause for hope. So these aren't all folks you want to pal around with? Go read a romance novel or something. I'm not clear that I was likeable in my 20s, so demanding that of characters seems a little feeble.
But why did I love this book? The way Phillips makes it when it comes to the city and regarding the experience, and not merely a reputation study. I was sitting reading this looking at beauteous Montana lake, and his evocative passages in regards to cafes and castles made me want to leave Glacier National Park and hop a flight to Budapest. I'm sorry, but I think that's damn fine writing. One and two-star, he's not. 26 of 29 persons found the following review helpful.
 A bit too clever?
By stackofbooks
In a starred review, Publishers Weekly praised Prague as one of the most dazzling debuts of the year. When I started Prague, I was floored by Phillip's exquisite writing and by the evocative atmosphere of Budapest (no, not Prague) he so expertly weaves into his book. Gradually however, the novel's ugly characters take up so much real estate that it becomes more and more difficult to ignore them. Mark, Charles, Emily, and John are a bunch of American expatriates who have descended on Hungary in the early `90's just after the wall was torn down. All four are young and are attempting vaguely to figure out the meaning of life in the Eastern bloc city. The characters are horribly self-absorbed and mean. While a good deal of have explained their self-absorption as a byproduct of their being a fellow member of Generation X, I submit that it is probably also a product of their expat status. For all their outwardly aggressive behavior, Budapest is a alien city to these people evidenced in the ease they find from a person just come from America, "they crowded around him eager for news from home". After I finished "Prague", I was very impressed by how well Phillips has portrayed his characters. So realistically in fact, that I was shaken by the worry that such obnoxious characters might without doubt subsist in real life. Charles hungrily swallows up an aging Hungarian native's (Imre Horvath) press and chalks it up to the ups and downs of capitalism. When John Price in truth tries to fetch authenti emotion to the front, he quickly dismisses it by admitting "he was penitent to feel his throat tighten. He rubbed his eyes until the tickling sensation passed. His absurdity seemed to have no limits anymore". I personally am not an exceedingly aroused person, but the characters' rigid one-dimensional lives left me with a vague sense of dreariness. Many have equated Phillip's writing style to that of Michael Chabon's (of Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay fame). Like Chabon, Phillips has a mastery of the language that is a treat to read. The book dazzles you with gems like, "As she moved somewhat to her music, she resembled an exotic species in an aquarium, a brightly colored swath of tattered material drifting and swaying in her own private current". One of my two favored constituents of the book was a description of an old Hungarian restaurant that Imre Horvath takes his potential buyers to. The ordinariness of the restaurant means not one thing to the newcomers, but nostalgia allows the restaurant to occupy a particular place in Horvath's heart. My other bestloved was the description of the Horvath press and it is owners over a great deal of generations. After reading all that, I was only more trouble at how casually the press at long last got sucked up by capitalism, the act being an uttermost cliché. While Phillips admits to using clichés in the book, their use in all probability liberated him sufficient to paint his characters and settings so painstakingly well. Read Prague for the atmosphere and the wondrous writing, but steel yourself to meet characters you will love to hate. See all 169 client reviews... |
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