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Arthur Phillips, Prague Arthur Phillips's first novel, Prague, attracted a good deal of critical attention and won significant acclaim. It deserved it, I think. At the very best, Prague is an imaginative, original and excellently written novel. Some reviewers even compared Phillips to Hemingway, although this was probably going too far. Phillips tells a story of five American expatriates in post-Communist Budapest of late 1989 and 1990 (well, one of them is Canadian). They are representatives of the lost American generation - in their mid-twenties, always on the verge of boredom, searching skeptically and half-heartedly for the meaning of life in a country that is brimming with meanings and opportunities. We meet Charles Gabor, a young MBA who ends up in the Budapest branch of a venture capitalist firm by virtue of his Hungarian heritage and language skills. Increasingly frustrated with his junior position and the firm's reluctance to commit to any projects in Hungary while pouring money into Czechoslovakia, Charles eventually takes off on his own venture capitalist project. Mark Payton, a Canadian history post-doc, comes to Budapest to do research on nostalgia - and finds so much history, memory and forgetting that his research stalls, he spends days navel-gazing, and finally, on the verge of insanity, goes back to the history-free Canada. A chipper young Midwesterner, Emily Oliver, ends up in the U.S. embassy in Budapest, helping the socially helpless ambassador match ties and jackets for official functions, and pretending to follow in the footsteps of her father's diplomatic career. Finally, John Price comes to Hungary to reunite with his brother Scott, who fled to Eastern Europe from his family, and, particularly, from his brother. The group hangs out at Budapest bars and cafes, watches with disgust the influx of American tourists, drinks cheap wine, and plays sincerity - "a deceptively simple game," in which each player takes turns making statements about oneself, four in total, only one of which is true. They cannot be verifiable statements of fact, and one scores points for each deceived player, and for each sincere statement guessed. (I couldn't help thinking that the game of sincerity could be a welcome replacement for "two truths and a lie" as a Harvard social icebreaker.) They also wish they were elsewhere - namely, in Prague. The book, of course, is not about Prague, or even about Hungary. But in my opinion Phillips is at his best when he leaves his characters for a while and goes off on a long tangent about the history of a small Hungarian publishing house in the second part of the book. He follows its fortunes through decades of changing rulers, fortunes, regimes and ideologies. In a hundred or so pages Phillips draws up a powerful description of Hungarian history - de-romanticized, unabashedly and almost self-indulgently honest, slightly ironic, lyrical, and fundamentally human. After this beautiful and forceful chapter, the book unfortunately begins to fall apart. Although the characters remained believable, I was increasingly bored with their unrelenting navel gazing and my attention began to waver. The latter parts still have their highlights. One of them is undoubtedly the episode in which the characters run into a student researcher for the unnamed but easily identifiable Let's Go guides. On the last day of his planned stay in Budapest - before going on to the more exciting Prague - he scours the most popular Budapest nightclub for English-speaking expatriates and greedily writes down the drivel they feed him in an effort to discourage tourists from coming to Budapest. "Yea, this is a gay bar. This one, too… I know, Budapest is like the gay capital of Eastern Europe now." Overall, the book is worth checking out, and I will definitely have a look at Phillips's next novel when it comes out. But don't expect too much or you will be disappointed. |