Miloš Urban

Praga Piccola

Praga piccola Praga piccola
Praga piccola
Argo, 2012, 436 pp
9788025707371
Goodreads rating
77.6% (Rated by 124 users)
Prose

Fiction based on memoir notes of a certain Bertold Neuman (1900–1992), a patriot of the Prague Libeň district, the son of an engineer at the legendary Praga car factory. Fiction or reality? With Urban, the reader never knows. In any case, his new book is definitely different: no ingenious murders, thrilling amorous, conspirational or politically critical scenes, no clever use of trash literary devices and motifs under the surface of playful post-modernism – but direct, chronological narrative which does not lack a plot, yet the story develops very slowly, perhaps even sluggishly. The author’s style is similarly dull but picturesque. Great history, from the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian empire to World War II, is simply documented here by a “little” son of the factory owner. There is perhaps time and place for some direness in the second, maybe the third layer of this work – superficially, everything is perfect. As in a memory.

Praga piccola
Argo, 2012, 436 pp
9788025707371
Goodreads rating
77.6% (Rated by 124 users)