The title of Arthur Phillips' novel Prague is a joke that sets the tone for the book: it takes place in Budapest but its characters, young North Americans playing the expat game in newly post-Cold War Hungary, all believe that life would be much cooler in Prague.
Being one place and dreaming about another is the condition that Phillips explore at length in this very funny but equally sad book. One of his characters is a scholar of nostalgia who can tell you what previous times people pined for at any moment in history. He believes he has pinpointed the first European artists' cafe experience of which all others, from the Parisian boulevard haunts of your favorite literary figures right down to your local Starbuck's, are Nth-generation copies. Anyone who has ever envied Hemingway and Fitzgerald their lostness while harboring doubts about whether there was really any there there on the Left Bank, either, will be able to relate.
The book opens with another of its themes, the parlor game Sincerity, in which players go around the table telling precisely three lies and one truth and points are earned for distinguishing between them. (Heather Champ hosts a weblogger's variation on the game in her blog.) Deception, that staple of 20th century genres from the simple mystery to the self-conscious literary tale told by an unreliable narrator, is ubiquitous in the world of Prague. Everyone is fooling everyone else, most of all themselves. And yet, as in the game of Sincerity, truth creeps in as well and can be harder to swallow than the lies.
A couple of quotes. Here is the historian of nostalgia:
No one ever knew they were old-fashioned; everyone always thought they were up-to-the-minute: Rickety Model T cars weren't rickety when they were invented, scratchy radio wasn't scratchy until television, and silent movies weren't a feeble precursor of talkies until there were talkies. Your two-piece telephone that demanded that you hold a cylinder to your ear while you screeched into the wall demanding a particular exchange of a harried, plug-juggling operator was the highest of high-tech. To know it was anything less would have been like acknowledging you were going to die and life was transient and you were already halfway to being a memory or worse. The real and worst tragedy of twentieth-century East Europeans: They had known they were old-fashioned before they could do anything about it.
Article comments
1 - Sean Hackbarth
Who said irony was dead? Nobody told Arthur Phillips. The approach was overdone. Everyone wasn't exactly what they appeared. Sounds like real life. Maybe that's an ironic point Phillips missed. But you see the endless literary analysis that can take place with a novel like this. At least I didn't hate any of the characters, and the depiction of Budepest tempts me to visit Orbitz to check on flights.