Prague – Arthur Phillips

Condition : Good.
Random House, 2002, Medium-format Paperback – Fiction – 379pp.

Prague depicts an intentionally lost Lost Generation as it follows five American expats who come to Budapest in the early 1990s to seek their fortune – financial, romantic, and spiritual – in an exotic city newly opened to the West.

They harbour the vague suspicion that their counterparts in Prague, where the atmospheric decay of post – Cold War Europe is even more cinematically perfect, have it better. Still, they hope to find adventure, inspiration, a gold rush, or history in the making.
What they actually find is a deceptively beautiful place that they often fail to understand.

What does it mean to fret about your fledgling career when the man across the table was tortured by two different regimes? How does your short, uneventful life compare to the lives of those who actually resisted, fought, and died? What does your angst mean in a city still pocked with bullet holes from war and crushed rebellion?