Prague: A Novel by Arthur Phillips
My review
rating: 4 of 5 stars
A deliciously cultural novel about love and longing by Americans living in Budapest during the early 1990s, Prague offers what many novels do not: stylistic tact. Like Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Louis De Bernieres, the dense literary qualities both in poetic vocabulary and fluid tone allow the world to literally transform from page to page, scene to scene, like a fairly objective movie camera. And often the book is like a movie as its plot is well constructed and sound.
My only beef with this book? The plot, of which I just praised. The plot ends up being more of a burden than anything else. A bunch of loose ends somehow connected together, I often found myself taking this plot and asking: “Why aren’t the characters actually doing anything exciting?” Though there are several wonderful scenes with several wonderful characters, including a night club with told and retold stories, an episode where our protagonist gets hit in the head with a thrown rock, and of course the bar experiences, I often felt like the characters were too finely-tuned and required more abstract, emotional ties to their environments.
I recommend this book with much emphasis, however, as it shows that contemporary literature can be long, involving, and not particularly experimental to win one’s attention, and having been to Budapest, I can confirm that, despite many of the locations used being either fictional or simply screaming of tourist, Phillips’s paints a Hungary, including the culture and people within it, that is accurate, moving, and inspiring.
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