"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?" Budapest: City of GritJohn Price left California for Budapest in search of adventure, but also to reconnect to his older brother Scott. When he was younger, Scott w...

So if this was set in 2022, John Price would have been working at BuzzFeed Hungary and writing listicles, so like in honour of that FIVE REASONS WHY THIS BOOK WILL MAKE YOU WANT TO POKE OUT YOUR EYES WITH STICKS1. The structure and plot are incoherent.Like you're barely invested in your main five crew of expat assholes before section 2 starts and we spend a solid 60 pages reading a biography of some totally random person's life that has had absolutely nothing to do with the narrative up until th...

This is one of those books that I had to force myself to keep reading and then was glad I did. Some memorable characters and moments and some great lines. But also not much of a plot and quite a few flashy sentences where it felt like the author was just showing off and intruding on his own work in the process.

This novel perfectly captures youth on the precipice of adulthood, full of earnest yearning, eternal questions, irony and a creeping cynicism and even dread that that moment, right then, is about as good as it gets. It's about a group of American expats hanging out in Eastern Europe, Budapest to be exact, where they all yearn for Prague, the epitome of cool, told in thick stylish ironic prose that I enjoyed, laughed at, and occasionally envied. Having been an expat myself at about the same point...

I have very much enjoyed other books by this author ("The Egyptologist" and "The Tragedy of Arthur" in particular). Phillips is a writer who wears his smarts on his sleeve, which can induce both admiration and frustration from me depending on my mood and my concentration. I found this book to be slow going, perhaps because the narrative sometimes mirrors the aimlessness of its main characters, but there are scenes of undeniable greatness; the second section in particular, about the history of th...

A Tale of Two CitiesDespite the title, the novel “Prague” is set exclusively in Budapest, the capital of Hungary.A Confession and a GeneralisationFirst, a confession: I am hopelessly, romantically nostalgic about Hungary, a nation I have never visited.There is a girl involved, well a woman, and the years were 1978 and 1979.But you don’t want to know about that. Besides, we would need a few glasses of Bull’s Blood to taste the flavour of those times.Second: a gross generalization: obviously influ...

In the early 1990's, the first flourish of "Generation X" novels started getting published. Writers like Douglas Coupland, Bret Easton Ellis, and Jay McInerney composed incredibly self-conscious, pretentious novels and imagined themselves the voice of a generation. What they were, in large part, was a squeaky reiteration of a far more compelling earlier cultural icon: upon closer examination, it became clear that, apparently, Generation X was almost entirely composed of squeaky-voiced Holden Cau...

I'm with the reviewer who wants a medal for finishing this book. It was a slog, during which I kept stopping to read reviews to figure out what on earth I was missing. The promo copy compared the author to Proust and Joyce. Reviewers likened him to Kundera. To me his work resembled nothing more than pretentious freshman ramblings designed to impress writing professors. I am here to tell you, the emperor has no clothes. This is a boring book, peopled by worthless two-dimensional (and that's being...

No one cares about your boner, John. NO. ONE.You are boring and whiny and mistakenly think groinal longings are a substitute for deep introspection. I don't blame your brother for hating you. You seem like a paltry rewriting, an id, of the author. I can think of no other reason why Phillips would find it necessary to focus on you. In the real world, you would never get laid, but rather become an MRA, wear a fedora, and end up shooting someone because your privilege and entitlement taught you you...

Prague promises much more than it actually delivers. I was lured into reading it by the magnitude of praise - it won numerous awards and the reviews were positive, comparing the author to such writers as Kundera and Hemingway, even F. Scott Fitzgerald - unfortunately that's not the case.The novel is supposed to deal with a group of expatriates who came to Budapest to discover themselves. That's an interesting theme, but it's all what it is - one prologned theme, without suspense. It quickly beco...

The blurb on the cover of my copy of this book, a quote from the NY Times, hovering impressively above the title, says, "Ingenious.. Phillips presents his characters with a wry generosity and haunting poingnancy to rival his wonderfully subversive wit." To this I say "Whatever". I was completely irritated by this book from start to finish. It was suffused by this whole eyebrows-sardonically-raised-at-everything-hipsters-too-cool-to-betray-any-enthusiasm-for-anything thing that I find insufferabl...

I really wanted to love this book since I am 1/4 Hungarian and feel vaguely cheated by my college's having not really endorsed study abroad until after I graduated. In addition, the concept was quite original and the author seemed very charming when I interacted with him once (and I'd already paid for my book so it wasn't cupboard love, at least, not entirely). However, I found the characters somewhat annoying and I didn't really care what happened to them. The best part of the book was the desc...

White. Male. Privilege. If you want to read an overlong dictionary definition of white male privilege (WMP), read this book and then try not to shoot yourself in the face. Three more words: Good. Freaking. God. Reading this book was so draining, and I usually quit books I don't like, but I felt the need to see this one through because I like Budapest so much. This is the plot: Four horrible men and one unlikeable woman, Americans all, go to Budapest in 1990 to exploit the new system of Democracy...

The best way to encapsulate this book is with the words of the great observer of human nature Robert Benchley in his wonderful short piece 'Christmas Afternoon', "In the first place, there was the ennui. And such ennui as it was! A heavy, overpowering ennui, such as results from a participation in eight courses of steaming, gravied food, topping off with salted nuts which the little old spinster Gummidge from Oak Hill said she never knew when to stop eating--and true enough she didn't--a draggin...

Really enjoyed this. Minus one star for being heavy-handed at times.

If you've ever met anyone who's been to Europe, you'll understand the humor behind these delightfully loathsome characters. Not a bad book, funny at times, annoying at others. I liked it, but I have to admit that had I not been delayed in the airport in Nice, I never would have gotten as far as I did. Once I got home to the States I put it down for good. 4/5 of the way finished. Good read for a beach vacation in France. Not much of a page-turner though.Actually, fuck it. It's a damn snooze fest....

Annoying American generation-Xers living in Budapest in the very early 1990's. The only interesting character in the book is somewhat of a cliche - an elderly female jazz pianist/singer who tells some great stories. It turns out that her stories probably are lies, but they're good stories, nonetheless.

Read this a long time ago --and loved it....Would like to read his book "The Tragedy of Arthur" sometime, also!

If the Age of Irony reached its comic peak with David Eggers and Jonathan Franzen, it's grown to full maturity in the debut work of a young man named Arthur Phillips. Yes, ironically, the apotheosis of coolness is a novel about Budapest called "Prague" by a Midwesterner who lives in Paris.In a story of devastating emotional accuracy, striking intelligence, and irrepressible wit, Phillips follows five friends through Hungary in 1990. Here is a lost generation that knows it's a lost generation, a

On Arthur Phillips’ website, the following pivotal passage is included in the synopsis of Prague, his first novel:"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?"These words are placed in the mouths of the novel’s pri...