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Prague: A Novel

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Overview

A first novel of startling scope and ambition, Prague depicts an intentionally lost Lost Generation as it follows five American expats who come to Budapest in the early 1990s to seek their fortune-financial, romantic, and spiritual-in an exotic city newly opened to the West. They harbor the vague suspicion that their counterparts in Prague, where the atmospheric decay of post-Cold War Europe is even more cinematically perfect, have it better. Still, they hope to find adventure, inspiration, a gold rush, or history in the making. What they actually find is a deceptively beautiful place that they often fail to understand.

Editorial Reviews

This audacious first novel is set where else in Budapest; Prague is simply the place to be, but our protagonists have not been able to get there. What amounts to a plot a term that entails too ordered a progression of events to seem quite right here unfolds in those heady days of 1989-90, right after communism expires in Eastern Europe, and involves a group of young expats (one Canadian, the rest Americans) with overlapping lives. Also present is a distinguished Hungarian survivor of last century's twin horrors, fascism and communism. Despite the often desultory movement of Phillips's characters along the avenues of Pest and across the Danube bridges, with little happening but the disappointment that nothing much is happening, the author commands a sweep of history and a mastery of language that make this debut highly impressive. Phillips's exhilarating exploration of time, memory, and nostalgia brings to mind such giants as Proust and Joyce. A rich, spicy goulash served up to all with an appetite for fine writing and history. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 3/1/02.] Edward Cone, New York Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information. -- PUBLISHERS WEEKLY.

Author Information

Bio of Arthur Phillips

Arthur Phillips is the bestselling author of The Egyptologist and Prague, which was a New York Times Notable Book and winner of the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. He lives in New York with his wife and two sons.

Customer Reviews

  • 2 stars out of 5Too slow

    Posted March 22, 2009 by Arielle, Houston, TX

    I thought I would like this book, and to be honest I haven't finished it yet, so it might get better. I was well into it when I put it aside however, and the characters did not seem believable to me at all. All of the convoluted sentences that I thought I would enjoy were extremely tedious. If there is a plot brewing in this novel, it's on slow drip. I'm giving it a "Just ok" because I haven't finished it, and I'm giving the benefit of the doubt...but so far, it's totally thumbs down for me. I reserve the right to change my opinion if I ever finish it!

  • 2 stars out of 5Drags

    Posted July 01, 2009 by Lisa, Huntington

    This book just didn't get it for me. I am 250 pages into this book and I am going to stop now. Life is short and there are a lot of books out there. I read a LOT of books and very few do I stop before finishing. Poor character development in this book. I still don't care about the characters at all or even feel like I know them. Just seemed like a lot of blah blah blah. A good author can really speak volumes with a few sentences and make you feel like they really "got it". I don't recommend this book.

Additional Info

Imprint

Random House

Filesize

869.99 KB

Number of Pages

400

eBook ISBN

9781588362834

Awards

  • Los Angeles Times Book Prizes
  • Publishers Weekly Best Books of the Year

Excerpt from: Prague by Arthur Phillips

PART ONE

FIRSTIMPRESSIONS

HE DECEPTIVELY SIMPLE RULES OF THE GAME SINCERITY, AS played late one Friday afternoon in May 1990 on the terrace of the Caf Gerbeaud in Budapest, Hungary:

1. Players (in this case, five) arrange themselves around a small caf table and impatiently await their order, haphazardly recorded by a sulky and distracted waitress with amusing boots: dollhouse cups of espresso, dense blocks of cake glazed with Art Nouveau swirls of translucent caramel, skimpy sandwiches dusted red-orange with the national spice, glass thimbles of sweet or bitter or smoky liqueurs, tumblers of bubbling water ostensibly hunted and captured from virgin springs high in the Carpathian Mountains.

2. Proceeding circularly, players make apparently sincere statements, one statement per turn. Verifiable statements of fact are inadmissible. Play proceeds accordingly for four rounds. In this case, the game would therefore consist of twenty apparently sincere statements. Interrupting competition with discursive or disruptive conversation, or auxiliary lies, is permitted and praiseworthy.

3. Of the four statements a player makes during the course of the game, only one is permitted to be "true" or "sincere." The other three are "lies." Players closely guard the identity of their true statements, the ability to simulate embarrassment, confusion, anger, shock, or pain being highly prized.

4. Players attempt to identify which of their opponents' statements were true. Player A guesses which statements of players B, C, D, and E were true. Player B then does the same for players A, C, D, and E, et cetera. A scoring grid is made on a crumb-dusted cocktail napkin with a monogrammed (cmg) fountain pen.

5. Players reveal their sincere statements. A player receives one point for each of his or her lies accepted by an opponent as true and one point for each identification of an opponent's true statement. In today's game of five people, a perfect score would be eight: four for leading each poor sap by the nose and four more for seeing through their feeble, transparent efforts at deception.