Well that was delightful; like sitting down over coffee with a kindred spirit to discuss our shared experiences and interests.

There are too few reviews here, so I may write more, but not today. ( )

If, like I, you read the re-issued version of this book with an afterword written by the author in 2002, you'll likely be struck (as I was) by the extent of growth Hampl's writing has managed since this memoir was originally published. The spare, probing, and thoughtful prose of the afterword exposes (by contrast) a fixation on the self that corrupts the book itself - a young American writer in Prague finds mostly what she sought, I think. The main body of Hampl's memoir is fixated to the point of distraction on identifying authors with cities - first Fitzgerald and St. Paul, MN, then Kafka and Prague. Here, Hampl is abetted by the character of Jaromil, a Czech poet she befriends on one of her trips to Prague in the 1970's, whose inability to describe life under the Communist regime leads him to simply mutter "Kafka" and shrug his shoulders. I often found the descriptions of the former Czechoslovakia reductive and voyeuristic, but the contrast between the book and its afterword is actually a fascinating window into the author's growth with time (almost 30 years!) If you survive the memoir, you'll be rewarded by the conclusion. ( )

Ex-library; reading copy only