Prague Pictures: Portraits of a City

The author knows Prague very well and writes with great affection and deep knowledge of it's history. The interested reader will find exhaustive information on Prague and it's culture. The author concentrates most on the high baroque, the achievements of emperor Rudof's court and the architectural renewal of the city.

This sumptuously-written book evokes Prague with so much soul and intimacy that it leaves all rival Prague portraits in the dust. Not only does the author feel everyday experiences more acutely than most of us, but he is able to maintain the depth of his poetic explorations from the beginning to the end. Having been there myself before and after the Velvet Revolution, and having also witnessed the cultural highs and lows he so perfectly describes, I almost feel like I know him. (I wish I did). This is so special a book that I almost want to tuck it into a private place on my bookshelf where no one can find it, and snobbishly, I suppose, lend it only to those I feel are perceptive enough to understand.

John Banville, in many of his novels, conjures up the alchemical and scientific wonders of early modern Europe: Copernicus, Kepler, Newton, Dr Faustus. His prose always has daunted me from taking on his dense, serious fiction, but perhaps, after this wonderfully self-deprecating, nimbly observed, and precisely rendered collection of thoughts inspired by events and people in Prague, I will try his novels! As Banville prefaces this small but pleasingly compacted assemblage of ruminations, it is not a guidebook but (my words) a momento urbi, a reminder of this city. He avoids post-Wall sightseeing (contrast Myla Goldberg's Time's Magpie), limits his Kafka citations wisely (compare nearly any other journalist!), and steers clear from tiresome dynastic recitals (unlike Peter Demetz' City of Black & Gold). Out of his travels there, starting in 1975, he instead opts to build slightly interrelated essays. The first, "Sudek's City," tells of the Professor and Marta, who show him and his companions prints by Josef Sudek, a photographer (two of which I presume grace this book's covers), who reveals tangibly yet tangentially the post-war era. Banville links the dislocation of the jet-lagged traveller in the hotel room with the wider struggle by a people to overcome alienation in their home city, yet such connections are left subtle, for us to tie together. The description in a page or so of the Professor, who himself threatens to become effaced after so many decades of having to blend in to such surroundings, is one of the most powerful depictions in print I have ever read of summing up another human in a few well-chosen words. "Threshold," from which the name for Prague was derived, merges the background on the city with its monuments, even as Banville insists that they do not make Prague what it is, this essence too elusive. Fittingly, such fluidity blends into an account of Rudolf and the intellectual climate that lured some of Europe's most creative minds in the later 16th c. to study magic, astronomy, the occult, and the rational, or mixes thereof. "The Prague Orgy", while never mentioning Philip Roth, starts with Banville's teenaged longing for a minor Czech actress, Eva Bartok, and his longing for such dark beauties, often with (sans makeup!) pale plum-hued shadows under their eyes. He segues into his friend Phil who boasts of "The Company," the Havel era, the "putative parents" of his hostess at a doomed dinner party, to conclude, paraphrasing another Philip (Larkin) that "nothing, like something, can happen anywhere. Banville again evokes psychological dislocation marvellously, keeping control of his shifting scenes while hiding from we his readers his manipulative strings. He's too good a writer to let his craft show so nakedly. From one who wrote a novel called "Kepler," the chapter "Great Dane, Little Dog" relates the long story of Tycho Brahe, his unfortunate death for the sake of royal etiquette, and his somewhat unwilling apprentice Jo

Lovers of Banville's fiction will appreciate the same feel for language and beautiful writing which is this writer's hallmark. His knowledge of Prague spans more than 20 years of both pre- and post-communist rule, and very nicely gives the flavour of these two very different periods, without reverting to clichés about the Cold War, etc. Filled with wondeful personal anecdotes as well as more general interesting knowledge, the book may to some seem incoherent. However it not only makes you want to visit Prague, but gives much appreciated sections on Czhech art photography (I fell in love with the cover - especially the back), astronomy (perhaps not too surprising, given some of Banville's novels), and the strange behaviour of European royalty. Its wide span is to be applauded rather than seen as a shortcoming - it is after all not *meant* to be a traditional travel guide. I finished this book while on vacation (regrettably not in Prague), moved on to some currently popular crime novelist, and almost immediately threw that book away in disgust when comparing the prose to what Banville (true to form) serves up in this little gem.