Ivan Myšková and Jan Zikmund start this book with an introduction that outlines a brief history of the city of Prague and fits each story into its place in this history, which is a very useful approach. The collection includes stories from various time periods from the 1950s to the 2020s and written in a variety of styles, giving a fascinating glimpse into life in this major European city.
A major theme that runs through the collection is how much the city has changes, particularly since the end of communism. These changes include, but are by no means limited to, changes in the city's green-spaces, which I'm particularly interested in as a naturalist, but which are also indicative of broader changes in societal values and quality of life.
Everyone Has Their Reasons by Simona Bohatá (translated by Alžběta Belánová) is an insightful and moving story about the connections people make and trying to make amends for wrongs done. The narrator is a released prisoner who observes how much the city has changed while he has been incarcerated:
"instead of the wild bushes and tall trees, all he saw were neat pathways, a playground and large signs with the city patting itself on the back for cleaning up so nice. They’d only left the grassy hill
with flat trees as a theatre prop."
One city green-space that recurs in a number of the stories is Prague's Jewish cemetery. The Jewish cemetery is a central focus of Irena Dousková's All’s Well in the End (translated by Melvyn Clarke), in which the narrator is mourning his mother and trying to fulfil her last wishes to be buried in the old Jewish cemetery. Being a recent convert, she wasn't allowed to be buried in any of the Jewish cemeteries that were still in use. This story muses on the meaning of life and death and the relationship of Jews with their neighbours (a particularly pertinent issue at the moment).
The old Jewish Cemetery lost over half its land when a television tower was built in the late 1980s. Patrik Banga in his story Žižkovite (translated by Alex Zucker) observes: "I still wonder who had the stomach to make that decision, entirely humiliating the ancestors of the Jewish people buried there."
Banga's story focuses on his childhood in Žižkov, an area of Prague that was then considered deprived, but was rich in community spirit and that has since been replaced by modern buildings. He considers the changing attitudes to the Roma community and the central position of music to Roma culture: "one of the first questions we always asked each other whenever we got together was, What instruments do your kids play? You don’t even want to imagine the disgrace if you dared to answer None."
Like Žižkov, the old Liben area has entirely disappeared from Prague, being demolished in the 1970s/80s. In My Libeň (translated by Paul Wilson) Bohumil Hrabal remembers being "never able to get enough of the poetry of this quarter on the outskirts of Prague,"
In Realities by Marek Šindelka (translated by Graeme & Suzanne Dibble) the narrator, addressing a woman named Anna, ponders the meaning of life, love, politics and branding and concludes that: "Reality doesn’t have a story, only an infinite number of shards which form more and more new patterns in this mad kaleidoscope of our short lives."
In among an almost dizzying series of observations on the changes in the city, the story notes how technology has impacted the natural world: "The birds on the roofs weave their nests in the tops of antennae and couldn’t care less that the internet is running through them...... Foxes have learned to live in rubbish bins, all sweaty from the glutamate, and howl at the moon with tongues lacerated on tin cans."
Nature takes on a surreal edge in A Summer Night by Michal Ajvaz, (translated by Andrew Oakland) an entertaining tale on the edge of nightmare, in which the protagonist is pursued through Prague by a giant clam.
"It occurred to me to lure the clam to my home, where I would place a billiard ball inside it, feed it and wait for the ball to be coated with mother-of-pearl."
The narrator of Jan Zábrana's A Memory (translated by Julia and Peter Sherwood) looks back to 1952 when he was working in an abattoir in the city. Also set in the 1950s is Blue by Marie Stryjová (translated by Geoffrey Chew) in which two students go on an awkward date by the River Vlata. Another story of young love is Waiting for Patrik by Veronika Bendová (translated by Paul Kaye). The narrator (also called Veronika, implying that this is actually memoir rather than fiction) is waiting for her boyfriend to come back from England and listlessly working in a shop until her college course starts.
If you're starting to look for stories to read at Christmas, you could do far worse than Petr Borkovec's lovely, concise The Captain’s Christmas Eve (translated by Justin Quinn) in which a captain who lives in a care home is only allowed out once a year on Christmas Eve.
So, whether you've ever visited Prague or not, this wide-ranging collection of stories will give you glimpses into various aspects of the city.
The Book of Prague edited by Ivan Myšková and Jan Zikmund, published (26 October 2023) by Comma Press.
**
You may be interested in my other reviews of books in this series:
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