Prague Pictures

March 1, 2004
Part of Bloomsbury's "The Writer and the City" series, which also features excellent volumes on Paris, Sydney, and Florence, this collection of personal recollections is richly laced with the history of Europe's most haunting, melancholy city. Novelist Banville (Shroud) began his relationship with Prague in a bright January winter during the last years of the Cold War, when he agreed to help smuggle works of art out of Czechoslovakia. Banville's Prague includes his friends, many of whom found themselves at odds with the Communists and suffered for it, as well as larger-than-life historical figures such as astronomers Tycho Brahe and his sometime colleague Johannes Kepler. Banville presents a Prague of secrets and suspicion, an intellectual and artistic capital with a long history of political turmoil. Gracing the cover-and as haunting as the city itself-are two evocative photographs of Prague by Josef Sudek (whose works Banville smuggled to the West); more images like this would have been welcome. Nevertheless, this book is highly recommended for all travel and writing collections.-Linda M. Kaufmann, Massachusetts Coll. of Liberal Arts Lib., North Adams

Copyright 2004 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

February 15, 2004
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.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2004, American Library Association.)