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A review by left_coast_justin
Time's Magpie: A Walk in Prague by Myla Goldberg
3.0
Magpies are apparently known for collecting bright, shiny tidbits and lining their nests with them. This book is about some of the bright, shiny tidbits of history that one might encounter while walking around in Prague. What this book does not do is really address the state of Prague and its citizens in the present day, an omission that seems to really irritate some reviewers here. Her most extended interaction with a living, breathing Praguer* was a corrupt cop hitting her up for a "fine".
I approve of her writing style, which is sly and assumes a degree of worldliness in the reader:
Here's another example:
The author skates along the surface of the city, describing parks, museums and dwellings. We visit an anti-war protest and ride late-night trams with drunks heading home, but even these are treated as anthropology rather than interviews.
At several points in the book, I was reminded of something I'm generally deprived of here in California, which is the (for me) exciting but lonely feeling of walking in snappishly cool weather, summer is over and fine needles of rain are lancing into your face, and in all likelihood you're walking alone because sensible people know enough to stay indoors. I suspect that Goldberg, like me, enjoys afternoons spent this way because she, like me, enjoys being alongside people without actually being among them. When I closed this book at the end, I felt a deep sense of the sort of happy loneliness that walking in foreign cities produces in me.
*An actual word. I had to look it up.
I approve of her writing style, which is sly and assumes a degree of worldliness in the reader:
Considering Prague's nascent penchant for tourist traps--in recent years the city has inaugurated a Wax Museum, a Sex Machine Museum, and a Museum of Torture Instruments--the Museum of Communism is surprisingly restrained...Though whiffs of Western bias are detected in the museum's starry-eyed assertion that Radio Free Europe--and not, say, economic collapse--was a leading cause of the dissolution of the Communist regime, the exhibits strive toward cultivating an air of scholarship rather than polemic...What the museum neglects to mention, however, is that it actually serves as an antechamber to the real Museum of Communism, which is the city of Prague itself.
Here's another example:
The Communist philosophy of architecture viewed building ornament as an opportunity for oversized agitprop; and so the exteriors of Prague's Communist-era constructions are host to kerchiefed peasant women displaying leviathan feet too mighty for shoes and wrench-wielding mechanics caught mid-pull in heroic battles with hex nuts bigger than human heads. Divorced from propaganda and regime there is something sweet about a rectangular relief depicting a man inflating a tire, or laying bricks, or cutting stone, or carrying a food-laden tray to a table. These architectural artifacts retain a seed of Communism's idealism, which after all is a philosophy that contains within its ruptured, rotting heart a beautiful if chimerical concept.
The author skates along the surface of the city, describing parks, museums and dwellings. We visit an anti-war protest and ride late-night trams with drunks heading home, but even these are treated as anthropology rather than interviews.
At several points in the book, I was reminded of something I'm generally deprived of here in California, which is the (for me) exciting but lonely feeling of walking in snappishly cool weather, summer is over and fine needles of rain are lancing into your face, and in all likelihood you're walking alone because sensible people know enough to stay indoors. I suspect that Goldberg, like me, enjoys afternoons spent this way because she, like me, enjoys being alongside people without actually being among them. When I closed this book at the end, I felt a deep sense of the sort of happy loneliness that walking in foreign cities produces in me.
*An actual word. I had to look it up.