- Paperback: 400 pages
- Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks; Reprint edition (Jun 10 2003)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0375759778
- ISBN-13: 978-0375759772
- Product Dimensions: 13 x 2.1 x 20.3 cm
- Shipping Weight: 363 g
- Average Customer Review: 2.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (108 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #60,162 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
From Amazon
In 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 trying 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 job 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 insights are touched with mysticism, seems often to speak for the author, even in his barely repressed desire for John Price. For who would not love the good and unaffected, in the confusion, opportunism, and irony that characterize fin-de-siècle Europe? Phillips's five seekers are like mirrors that reflect Budapest at different angles, and that imperfectly--but wonderfully--point toward the unattainable city: the glittering, distant Prague. --Regina Marler
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
From Publishers Weekly
Everything about this dazzling first novel is utterly original, including the title: it's about 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 everyone would rather be, except they have all somehow settled for Budapest as second best to their idealized Central European city.The author's way of bringing his five central characters onstage is also devilishly clever. They are playing a game invented 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 elements 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 apparent innocent from Nebraska who works at the U.S. Embassy. At the heart of the story is Charles's attempt 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 artist and listens, enchanted, to the tales of an elderly pianist in the group's favorite jazz club. Mark disappears, Scott decamps and the publishing caper ends in disillusionment.But what happens in this novel is not nearly so important as Phillips's wonderful grasp Budapest's look, style and ethos, and his sometimes sympathetic, often scathing view of the Western interlopers. His writing is swift, often poetic, unerringly exact with voices and subtle details of time, place and weather. This novel is so complete a distillation of its theme and characters that it leaves a reader wondering how on earth Phillips can follow it up.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Inside This Book
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First Sentence
THE DECEPTIVELY SIMPLE RULES OF THE GAME SINCERITY, AS played late one Friday afternoon in May 1990 on the terrace of the Cafe Gerbeaud in Budapest, Hungary: 1. Players (in this case, five) arrange themselves around a small cafe 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. Read the first page
THE DECEPTIVELY SIMPLE RULES OF THE GAME SINCERITY, AS played late one Friday afternoon in May 1990 on the terrace of the Cafe Gerbeaud in Budapest, Hungary: 1. Players (in this case, five) arrange themselves around a small cafe 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. Read the first page
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Most helpful customer reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
3.0 out of 5 stars
Beautiful prose, not so interesting story or characters,
By
This review is from: Prague: A Novel (Paperback)
I believed the blurbs on the book that this was, finally, writing akin to the lost generation of ex-pats after WWI. I was sucked in by the hype, hoping for a book that would speak to my generation, and perhaps start a New Thing.But I hope it does not, for if it does, the new thing is only that of self-centered "Hey look at me!" gee-whiz-bangery. I will say, the prose in the book is beautiful. Phillipis is an artist with words. But the "Hey look at me cleverness!" of his writing style wears thin quickly, and one soon realizes that excessive detail and flowery prose is all he's working on, and the book eventually becomes tedious. Unlike that initial set of ex-pats, Phillips is unconcerned with story, and more concerned with making sure we all know how clever he is with word usage. He should have taken the attention to detail and florid prose of the first 20 pages, and smeared it out over the whole thing to make the cleverness part less dense. Then he would have had more room to develop characters that we would care about, situations that are interesting, and a story that is compelling. Sadly, as much as I really, really wanted to enjoy this book and be excited by it, I enjoyed it only minimally, and am not excited enough about it to recommend it to anyone. It wasn't a waste of my time, but I would rather have read something else. perhaps Phillips will lose his self-absorption, and turn out better books later. He appears that he might have the skill to do so.
1.0 out of 5 stars
actually, worse than 1 star,
By
This review is from: Prague: A Novel (Paperback)
I also bought it because I love Prague and because of the seemingly unanimous critical acclaim. This book just provides more proof that external gloss does not always mean substance inside the covers. This is the furthest thing from a beautiful book. If you love language and think that its ultimate goal should be clarity of thought and not obscurity, you will be as annoyed by the end of the first chapter as I was. The sentence structure and wording smack of pretension and self-conscious cleverness. Sentences are unnecessarily complicated and paragraphs meander away from any central purpose. The author regularly sprinkles in superluous/meaningless adjectives ("AMUSING boots"? "HUMOROUS nose"?) and constructs inelegant phrases ("...Mark Payton comes from Canada,.., where it doesn't look like this.."); it is difficult not to have the immediate impression that the author is going out of his way to appear profound. I am saddened to read that so many are fooled by these transparently awkward devices.Even if one has a fantastic, original story to tell--which I am not sure is entirely the case--nothing warrants this intentional abuse of language.
1.0 out of 5 stars
What were they thinking?,
By A Customer
This review is from: Prague: A Novel (Paperback)
Like many readers, I bought the book because of the great reviews, and because I love Prague. I can get over the fact that the book is set almost exclusively in Budapest. Budapest is great city also. But the reviewers see something that I just don't see in the this book. I hate to be repetitious, but the characters are really NOT likeable. They are whiney, self indulgent and shallow. The main character (John) is also an alcoholic. The book doesn't have much of a plot, so I'm assuming the author wrote it as a character piece. Life is too short for me to spend this many pages on characters I don't like. I am one of those people who always finished books, but this one is torture. Maybe I could lose it!
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