Prague

Fülszöveg

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 adven-
ture, inspiration, a gold rush, or history in the making.
What they actually find is a deceptively beautiful place
that they often fail to understand. What does it mean
to fret about your fledgling career when the man across
the table was tortured by two different regimes? How
does your short, uneventful life compare to the lives of
those who actually resisted, fought, and died? What
does your angst mean in a city still pocked with bullet
holes from war and crushed rebellion?
Journalist John... Tovább

Fülszöveg

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 adven-
ture, inspiration, a gold rush, or history in the making.
What they actually find is a deceptively beautiful place
that they often fail to understand. What does it mean
to fret about your fledgling career when the man across
the table was tortured by two different regimes? How
does your short, uneventful life compare to the lives of
those who actually resisted, fought, and died? What
does your angst mean in a city still pocked with bullet
holes from war and crushed rebellion?
Journalist John Price finds these questions impossible
to answer yet impossible to avoid, though he tries to
forget them in the din of Budapest's nightclubs, in a
romance with a secretive young diplomat, at the table of
an elderly cocktail pianist, and in the moody company
of a young man obsessed with nostalgia. Arriving in
Budapest one spring day to pursue his elusive brother,
John finds himself pursuing something else entirely,
something he can't quite put a name to, something that
will draw him into stories much larger than himself.
With humor, intelligence, masterly prose, and pro-
found affection for both Budapest and his own charac-
ters, Arthur Phillips not only captures his contemporaries
but also brilliantly renders the Hungary of past and
present: the generations of failed revolutionaries and
lyric poets, opportunists and profiteers, heroes and story-
tellers. Vissza