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Author: John Banville
One in Bloomsbury - The Writer and the City series
Prague is the magic capital of Europe.
Since the days of Emperor Rudolf II, “devotee
of the stars and cultivator of the spagyric
art”, who in the late 1500s summoned
alchemists and magicians from all over
the world to his castle on Hradèany
hill, Prague has been a place of mystery
and intrigue. Wars, revolutions, floods,
the imposition of Soviet communism,
and even the depredations of the tourist
boom after the Velvet Revolution of
1989 could not destroy the unique atmosphere
of this beautiful, proud, and melancholy
city on the Vltava. Banville traces
Prague’s often tragic history
and portrays the people who made it:
the emperors and princes, geniuses and
charlatans, heroes and scoundrels. He
also paints a portrait of the Prague
of today, reveling in its newfound freedoms,
eager to join the European Community
and at the same time suspicious of what
many Praguers see as yet another totalitarian
takeover. He writes of his first visit
to the city, in the depths of the Cold
War, and of subsequent trips there,
of the people he met, the friends he
made, the places he came to know.
From Booklist
Here is the latest installment in Bloomsbury's fascinating Writer in the
City series, which matches well-known writers with cities with which they
are intimately familiar. Banville has not written a guidebook but rather,
in his own words, "a handful of recollections, variations on a theme"--snapshots,
if you like, of the city's past and present. The book begins with the
author's first visit to Prague, during the cold war, but as we go deeper
into the book, we also go deeper into the city's history. Banville flicks
so effortlessly between past and present that Prague soon appears as a
collage, effectively lifting the city's rich and visible past out of time
and bringing it to life once again, as the author visits the birthplace
of Franz Kafka or steps inside a cathedral whose construction was begun
in 1344. While most travel memoirs clearly distinguish between the way
a place is today and the way it used to be, Banville's perspective is
somewhat different. This, he says, is Prague, past and present, the way
it has always been. David Pitt
© American Library Association. |
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$16.95 (hardcover)
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