Goulash

December 15, 2018
A young American expatriate struggles to find his footing in late-1990s Prague, which is having a hard time getting its own act together.Kimberling's (Snapper, 2013) second book is a comic novel, and the butt of the joke is usually Elliott, who arrives in the Czech capital from Indiana ("the South's middle finger") to teach English but is mostly disoriented by its absurd status following the Iron Curtain's collapse. Elliott's students allegedly want to claim some of capitalism's bounty but are mainly interested in learning English slang and mocking Americans' Cold War behavior. ("Either you had a low opinion of our bombs or a high opinion of your desks," one student tells Elliott in response to nuclear-bomb duck-and-cover drills.) Elliott is motivated to mature (somewhat) with the arrival of Amanda, a British ESL teacher he quickly falls for. Their romance runs at a low boil--after all, everything feels temporary in the city--but their travels through the new Czech Republic are entertaining, characterized by light irony or black comedy: A performance of Don Giovanni that "might as well have been mounted by toddlers"; the Church of Bones, where "beer cans, candy wrappers, and spent Marlboros" mix with "pelvises, coccyges, patellae, and skulls"; a cozy hotel where they spend the night that turns out to be a brothel. Kimberling has a rich store of peculiar tales to share, from a penguin smuggler to a mansion whose fireplace mantle "could have slept a family of five comfortably." The novel's episodic structure and laugh lines diminish the impact of Elliott's more sour reckonings toward the end, but Kimberling's deadpan wit and powers of observation amply compensate.A winning, offbeat yarn about life and love after communism.

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December 15, 2018
It's 1998, and Indiana native Elliott joins the wave of Americans and other Westerners invading Prague to drink beer, fall in love, and teach English. He meets Amanda, an Englishwoman, and they move in together, beginning a prickly and ultimately doomed relationship. That's about it, and yet this bare sketch doesn't do justice to this slim novel, which offers a remarkable evocation of time and place, transcending what could, in lesser hands, have been a journal thinly disguised as memoir. Kimberling, whose debut novel, Snapper (2013), was a Booklist Editors' Choice selection, is an exacting wordsmith capable of elegantly simple sentences, and his narrator's observations are often dryly hilarious. (One character touched things like books and forks like he was mad at them. ) If several passages of dialogue are a touch arch and stagy, it's forgivable. Possibly some readers will wish for deeper emotions, richer character development, or a story arc with a more pronounced curve, but others will delight in the digressions, historical asides, and trenchant observations in this tour of a Prague that no longer exists.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)

September 15, 2018

A personal favorite, Kimberling's engagingly thoughtful Snapper received NPR Best Book honors plus a scattering of gold stars, so pay attention to this follow-up. Abandoning small-town America for Prague, Elliot teaches English with the local pub as classroom and watches the Czech Republic move from communism to Wild West capitalism. Elliot also meets and falls in love with another English teacher, Amanda, who's from the UK. New life and new love in a strange land initially prove invigorating for them both. But what's going to happen?

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