Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Prague on Page & Screen
Reading a book or watching a film from a destination can facilitate a deeper un-
derstanding and add texture and depth. This is especially true for the Czech Re-
public, which has spawned many masterpieces. In literature, heavyweights such
as Milan Kundera and Franz Kafka honed their craft here. The underrated, anti-
war novel
The Good Soldier Švejk
is a stroke of comic genius that recalls
something of
Catch-22
. In film, the Czech 'New Wave' of the 1960s took the world
by storm with its bittersweet take on everyday life in a dysfunctional dictatorship.
CZECHS IN PRINT
The communist period produced two Czech writers of world standing, both of whom
hail originally from Brno: Milan Kundera (b 1929) and Bohumil Hrabal (1914-97).
For visitors, Kundera remains the undisputed champ. His wryly told stories weave ele-
ments of humour and sex along with liberal doses of music theory, poetry and philo-
sophy to appeal to both our low- and high-brow literary selves. His best known book,
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
(also made into a successful film in 1988), is set in
Prague in the uncertain days ahead of the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion. Look out too for
Kundera's
The Joke
and
The Topic of Laughter and Forgetting
.
The Czech language is highly inflected, giving writers ammo to build layers
of meaning simply by playing with tenses and endings. The undisputed
master was interwar writer Karel Čapek, author of several novels, including
the science-fiction work
RUR,
from where the modern word 'robot' derives.
Ask any Czech who their favourite author is and chances are they'll say Hrabal, and
it's not hard to see why. Hrabal's writing captures what Czechs like best about them-
selves, including a keen wit, a sense of the absurd and a fondness for beer. Hrabal is
also a great storyteller, and novels such as
I Served the King of England
and
The Little
Town Where Time Stood Still
are both entertaining and insightful. Hrabal died in 1997
in classic Czech fashion: falling from a window.
Other major talents who came of age during the period from the Warsaw Pact inva-
sion in 1968 to the 1989 Velvet Revolution include Ivan Klíma (b 1931) and Josef Šk-
vorecký (1924-2012). Klíma, who survived the WWII Terezín concentration camp as a
child and who still lives in Prague, is probably best known for his collections of bitter-
