I want to live inside every 7-11 in Prague |
"Get intimate with history" |
But back to the Communist part. One of my favorite novels of all time, which also happens to hail from CZ is The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Yeah, I know it's been around for forever and you don't need yet one MORE pretentious philosophy/English major type telling you to read it. BUT. Seriously, read it. The book starts off with the Prague spring in which the Soviets rolled into town and took over the country. The Czech people were under Soviet rule from 1968-1986 and they were happy to oust them. They even have a museum dedicated to how hard and crappy life was under the communists. The impression this iron fisted rule had on the art that comes out of the Czech Republic is varied. One such novel now in our destination literature section is Jiří Gruša's The Questionnaire. Gruša took a lot of heat for writing a novel in which the protagonist is faced with a bureaucrat and a job application and writes his own surrealist, world-building response to the questions. The book is bold, brave, unlike anything else yet totally familiar. The book David Foster Wallace wanted to write when embarking on The Pale King, or One Hundred Years of Solitude if it were the product of hundreds of years of Bohemian history.
Kafka is (of course) another super-important Czech author. There's a great museum dedicated to him in Prague with some WACKY sculptures of some of the more unsavory scenes from his stories. There's even a street named after him! You know you've made it when...
So come "Czech" out our new Destination Lit section (man, I bet nobody is sick of that pun yet). And while you're at it, sell us some cool books to stock it with. Wednesday through Saturday, 10 AM-4PM.
Note: Blurry, sub-par photographs from the author's travels. Don't judge.
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