Arthur Phillips' Prague is prefaced with the obligatory disclaimer that "any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental."
Phillips' fiction may start with those words. (Or the fiction may have started on the cover: as you probably know, Prague is actually about Budapest.)
In any case, as someone who worked as a journalist in Budapest during the period in which Prague is set, I can testify that the book is surprisingly prone to "coincidental resemblances" to fact.
I like the book. But since others have amply reviewed the book's literary merit, I'll spend my review sketching the parallels between Budapest fact and Prague fiction. I can't say whether these are unconscious echoes, sheer coincidences or Easter Eggs. But I suspect the latter.
First, a few facts about Phillips. He graduated from Harvard in the late 80s and moved with some friends to Budapest. He spent evenings playing saxophone in a small jazz club. He worked briefly for an American politico-turned-entrepreneur named Marc Holtzman. Trivia buffs might be amused to know that today Holtzman serves as Colorado's Secretary of Technology.
Phillips disclaimer notwithstanding, perhaps it should not surprise us that Harvey, one of Prague's protagonists, shares a few characteristics with Holtzman, not least his employment of "a sax-playing assistant." (Phillips' apparent proxie remains nameless throughout the book, but crops up with suspicious regularity to nod or mumble a few words and then disappear offstage.)
Harvey and his assistant work in a shabby office building with a conceirge located a couple blocks down the hill from the Buda castle; Holtzman and Phillips worked in a shabby building with a concierge on Ostrom street... a couple blocks down from the castle.
Harvey is given to name-dropping, idealistic stream of consciousness rambles, sentence fragments and gushing enthusiasm. Here's a fragment of Harvey's extended introductory monologue:
Exciting what we're going to do here, brave new world, a chance for all of us to make money together, and that's exactly what I tell the Hungarians: I want them to get rich, too, because I know I can get rich happier and faster if we all get rich together. All in the same boat. Western style office buildings, I have a head start on approvals, option for building convention center, minister a close personal friend of mine, first class fellow...
Harvey echoes Holtzman. Here's a slice of a Holtzman monologue from an article I wrote for The New Republic in 1993. Explaining why he was doing business in Eastern Europe, Holtzman said:
You have one-tenth of the population of the world that have nothing and need everything. This is probably one of the most impressionable and pivotal times in the history of the world. To be here and to be part of it, not only to be able to experience it, but to have the added benefit of potentially being able to profit from it too, is really close to the biggest thrill I think I can imagine.
(To hear today's Holtzman, listen to this radio interview.)
Article comments
1 - Stephen Frater
As one mentioned in the article as a model for Charles Gabor, all I can saw is that Budapest in 1989-1992 was never as dull and vapid as this book makes it appear. Yes I did buy a major historic printing company and yes it prospered and is still doing so almost a decade and a half later. We maintained full employment, raised quality and pay levels to international standards and won awards for doing so from among others the World Economic Forum. It remains among my proudest achievements. The sense of Hungary's rejoining the Europe and the world after almost a century of strife and fear is lost in the novel's myopic focus on a bunch of one dimensional yuppie louts. It was a time of lights, not shadows.
Stephen Frater