Prague - Hardcover

Phillips, Arthur

 
9780375507878: Prague
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0375507876 ISBN 13: 9780375507878
Verlag: Random House Inc, 2002

Inhaltsangabe

1. Amusingly, critics have cited both Phillips compassion for his characters and his lack of compassion for his characters. Which, if either, of these assessments seems accurate to you? Does an author s compassion for his or her characters matter to your experience of reading a story? Should an author implicitly or explicitly pass judgment or reserve judgment on the characters? Should he or she make clear to the reader which characters are admirable and which are not? 2. 1.How do you feel Part II ( The Horváth Kiadó ), the subplot detailing the history of a Hungarian publishing house, fits into the structure of Prague ? What function does it serve the novel as a whole? What is gained or lost by its placement immediately after the stories introduced in Part I ( First Impressions )? 3. At the end of the novel, journalist John Price, arguably the central character of the novel, is en route to the city of Prague. What do you think becomes of him there and afterwards? 4. The title of the book is a subject of much discussion. While John is the only main character who aspires to the literal Prague, how do other characters reveal their longing for other places, times, and lives, for a metaphorical Prague ? Which, if any, of the characters seems to be most at peace in their real circumstances? 5. Did Charles Gábor, the American who invests in the Horváth press, behave badly? How? If so, what should he have done instead? If he behaved badly, did he know it? What do you think the Horváth press represents? Is its absorption by Multinational Median a loss? 6. What does History mean to the novel s characters? How does it shape their personalities and actions? Do you believe in a national character ? How much of an individual s personality do you think is dictated by it? How does the impact of characters family history compare to the impact of their national history? 7. Charles Gábor says intentionally offensive things to other characters, both in rounds of the game Sincerity and in general conversation. John Price s columns often say the opposite of what he feels. Nádja s stories are often loosely inspired by the lives of her listeners. How else does the concept of irony operate in this novel? In what ways can irony be harmful? Why do certain characters use it, and how? Who is the best liar in the novel? 8. Phillips lived in Budapest from 1990-92. Do you think, therefore, that his novel can be taken as an accurate portrait of that time and place? Can it be taken as reliable history or sociology? Can any novel? Do you believe Phillips when he states that his main characters are entirely fictional ? How do you think truth is transformed into fiction? 9. Can expatriate novels be considered a genre? If so, what do they have in common? Does Prague add anything new to this category? 10. The six Westerners and Mária are in their 20 s. Imre Horváth was in his 20 s during the World War II episodes of Part II. Nádja was in her 20 s in some of her stories. Does something happen to most people s personalities or attitudes in this period of their lives? How do people view an experience or an age differently as time separates them from it?

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Arthur Phillips was born in Minneapolis and educated at Harvard. He has been a child actor, a jazz musician, a speechwriter, a dismally failed entrepreneur, and a five-time Jeopardy! champion. He lived in Budapest from 1990 to 1992 and now lives in Paris with his wife and son.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

PART ONE

FIRSTIMPRESSIONS

HE DECEPTIVELY SIMPLE RULES OF THE GAME SINCERITY, AS played late one Friday afternoon in May 1990 on the terrace of the Caf Gerbeaud in Budapest, Hungary:

1.  Players (in this case, five) arrange themselves around a small caf table and impatiently await their order, haphazardly recorded by a sulky and distracted waitress with amusing boots: dollhouse cups of espresso, dense blocks of cake glazed with Art Nouveau swirls of translucent caramel, skimpy sandwiches dusted red-orange with the national spice, glass thimbles of sweet or bitter or smoky liqueurs, tumblers of bubbling water ostensibly hunted and captured from virgin springs high in the Carpathian Mountains.

2.  Proceeding circularly, players make apparently sincere statements, one statement per turn. Verifiable statements of fact are inadmissible. Play proceeds accordingly for four rounds. In this case, the game would therefore consist of twenty apparently sincere statements. Interrupting competition with discursive or disruptive conversation, or auxiliary lies, is permitted and praiseworthy.

3.  Of the four statements a player makes during the course of the game, only one is permitted to be “true” or “sincere.” The other three are “lies.” Players closely guard the identity of their true statements, the ability to simulate embarrassment, confusion, anger, shock, or pain being highly prized.

4.  Players attempt to identify which of their opponents’ statements were true. Player A guesses which statements of players B, C, D, and E were true. Player B then does the same for players A, C, D, and E, et cetera. A scoring grid is made on a crumb-dusted cocktail napkin with a monogrammed (cmg) fountain pen.

5.  Players reveal their sincere statements. A player receives one point for each of his or her lies accepted by an opponent as true and one point for each identification of an opponent’s true statement. In today’s game of five people, a perfect score would be eight: four for leading each poor sap by the nose and four more for seeing through their feeble, transparent efforts at deception.

II.

SINCERITY—A STAPLE AMONG CERTAIN CIRCLES OF YOUNG FOREIGNERS living in Budapest immediately following 1989–90’s hissing, flapping deflation of Communism—is coincidentally the much-admired invention of one of the five players in this very match, this very afternoon in May. Charles Gábor, when with people his own age, seems always to be the host, and at this small café table on this sunny patio he reigns confidently and serenely. He resembles an Art Deco picture of a 1920s dandy: long fingers, measured movements, smooth and gleaming panels of black hair, an audaciously collegiate tie, crisp pleated slacks of a favorite cotton twill, a humorously pointed nose, a sly half-smile, one eyebrow engineered for expressivity. Under the green and interlacing trees surrounding the terrace and nodding over the heads of tourists, resident foreigners, and the occasional Hungarian, Charles Gábor sits with four other Westerners, an unlikely group pieced together these past few weeks from parties and family references, friend-of-friend-of-friend happenstance, and (in one case, just now being introduced) sheer, scarcely tolerable intrusiveness—five people who, in normal life back home, would have been satisfied never to have known one another.

Five young expatriates hunch around an undersized café table: a moment of total insignificance, and not without a powerful whiff of cliché.

Unless you were one of them. Then this meaningless, overdrawn moment may (then or later) seem to be somehow the summation of both an era and your own youth, your undeniably defining afternoon (though you can hardly say that aloud without making a joke of it). Somehow this one game of Sincerity becomes the distilled recollection of a much longer series of events. It persistently rises to the surface of your memory—that afternoon when you fell in love with a person or a place or a mood, when you savored the power of fooling everyone, when you discovered some great truth about the world, when (like a baby duck glimpsing your quacking mother’s waddling rear for the first time) an indelible brand was seared into your heart, which is, of course, a finite space with limited room for searing.

Despite its insignificance, there was this moment, this hour or two, this spring afternoon blurring into evening on a café patio in a Central European capital in the opening weeks of its post-Communist era. The glasses of liqueur. The diamond dapples of light between oval, leaf-shaped shadows, like optical illusions. The trellised curve of the cast-iron fence separating the patio from its surrounding city square. The uncomfortable chair. Someday this too will represent someone’s receding, cruelly unattainable golden age.

To Charles Gábor’s right sits Mark Payton, who will eventually think of this very moment as one of the glowing, unequaled triumphs of his life. Retrospection will polish from this ambiguous, complicated afternoon all its rough edges, until Mark will be able to see nearly to its crystalline center, to its discernible seedpod of future events, to the (extremely unlikely) refraction of himself as a young and happy man, sniffing love and welcome in the spring air.

He sits at peace, a state he is lately finding harder and harder to achieve. When these five met at the Gerbeaud this afternoon, before Charles pulled out Emily Oliver’s chair for her, Mark was already discreetly securing the seat he wanted, as he always does at the half-dozen places he’s come to love in his two months in Budapest. He knows that his view, and with it his afternoon, perhaps even several days, would have been damaged if his secret wishes had been thwarted by a misseating of even forty-five degrees.

Safely placed, he can turn his head to the left and see the Café Gerbeaud itself, into its antique interior, into the very past: pastry cases, walls of mirrors and dark wood panels, red velvet seat cushions on gold-painted chairs. In daylight, the cushions are threadbare and the paint flakes, but Mark Payton doesn’t mind. A reupholsterer would steal a certain something in exchange for his handiwork. Atmospheric decay and faded glory reassure Mark, prove something. Much of Budapest—unpainted, uncleaned, unrepaired during forty-five years of Communist rule immediately following a brutal war—provides similar pleasures. For now.

Straight ahead and past his friends, Mark’s New World eye is treated to the grand, intentionally overwhelming European architecture of the nineteenth century (though it has long since lost the ability to overwhelm its native audience). For years Mark has longed to stare at such architecture, to inhale it, ingest it somehow. Unfortunately, he cannot forget that down Harmincad utca to the left, a Kempinski Hotel is slated to inflict its glass-and-steel corporate modernity on the odd, neglected asymmetry of neighboring Deák Square. But at least he can’t see the site’s unspeakable stretch marks and scars from where he sits.

Just to the right of tiny (hardly mappable) Harmincad utca stands an office building in his beloved typical-nineteenth-century Haussmann style, the sort of giant mansard-roofed beauty sprinkled all over Pest and Paris, Madrid and Milan. That its ground-floor, window-front space is occupied by the dusty and only sporadically open sales office of a second-string airline does not offend Mark’s aesthetics, because the decor of the office, plainly visible from his seat, is so absurdly 1960s East Bloc, so unintentionally and yet bittersweetly hilarious, that it...

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Verlag
Random House Inc
Erscheinungsdatum
2002
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0375507876
ISBN 13 
9780375507878
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Auflage
1
Anzahl der Seiten
367
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Purmerul LTD
https://strengholt.nl/en/

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