• Title: Prague Stories
• Author: Various
• Genre/Subject: Czech literature
• Publisher: Everyman
• Publication Date: 2020
• Start date: 7/12/24
• Finish date: 7/21/24

Review:

Something a little different for me with this volume. I will admit that I knew nothing about Prague, Czech Republic or Czech people other than Jaromir Jagr is from there. But now thanks to Everyman publishing I know a lot more. I still had to refer to my map of Europe to place all the locales in the stories but that’s a good thing really, as I now have a much better geographical knowledge as well as a literary one.

That word though, literary, is a bit of a misnomer for this book as most of it is non-fiction, traveler’s tales and histories. These were excellent, running from Kohl’s A Visit to Prague in 1841 to Madeleine Albright’s Revisiting Prague in 2003. Of course no collection of Czech stories would be complete without Franz Kafka who features not once but twice (both were weird and made me feel like I needed a shower and a walk in fresh air).

So what’s the deal with Prague? *Seinfeld theme starts playing* Prague is an old and historic city with an exquisite collection of Baroque buildings and bridges. Dresden was a comparable old baroque city but of course it was levelled during the war, a fate which Prague mostly avoided. Although in an interesting footnote there was a planeload of bombs destined for Dresden was dropped on Prague in error. Prague is and always has been of strategic importance due to its central location in Europe. Prague was also a center of both the reformation and the counter-reformation, but in a rare instance the Catholic and Protestants seem to have lived together pretty well for centuries. Lager beer as we know it now was invented in Czechia and remains popular to this day, although if you asked 10 people drinking lager where it was invented I don’t think more than one or two would say Czechia.

So I learned about a place I only knew as a name of a European capital, I learned a lot actually. And I enjoyed it too, despite it being different from the collection of short stories that I was expecting. Sometimes I need that to shake me out of a literary rut.

Good fiction, good non-fiction, good history, good everything. Was it a page-turner? Couldn’t put it down? No. But not everything needs to be thrill a minute non-stop action, and this was a good example of a solid, well curated collection that improved my knowledge and offered me a good reading experience. That’s a good thing.