The Magic That Was Prague

MAGIC PRAGUE by Angelo Maria Ripellino, translated by David Newton Marinelli (University of California Press, $30 hardcover).

Prague is hot, a bellwether of emerging Eastern European urbanism, a gloriously ornate tourist destination, a new mecca for American expatriates with an artistic bent. When Angelo Maria Ripellino (1923-1978), a professor of Russian language and lecturer in Czech language and literature at the University of Rome, published this book in Italian some 21 years ago (under the title “Praha magica”), however, Prague was still chilly. It was, that is, still shivering from the unseasonal and violent winter that had frozen out the reforms of the so-called “Prague Spring” five years earlier.

Socialist politics weren’t Ripellino’s concern, though--and the tragedy of Alexander Dubcek and his colleagues is not a story he tells. Instead, he presents a Prague full of fantasy and fantastical art and literature, a Prague in which ritual and superstition and unexplained events help shape the character of daily life. He quotes Nietzsche as saying, “When I seek another word for music, I always and only find the word Venice,” and adds that when he himself seeks “another word for mystery, the only word I can find is Prague.”

Appropriately enough, then, his book about the place is itself mysterious--part literary-philosophical textbook, part history, part autobiography, part educated traveler’s guide, part magic realism. It may be a bit much to claim, as the dust jacket does, that the book invents a new genre--but it certainly isn’t an easy work to classify. Suffice to say that the serious, literary-minded traveler to Prague (or the armchair traveler) will learn a great deal about its spirit and its past from this book. To the tourist looking for hotel recommendations, it will prove almost surrealistically useless.

*

CITY WOMEN: Stories of the World’s Great Cities, edited by Liz Heron (Beacon Press, $30 hardcover, $15 paper).

“A tiny, chubby Chinese child is running races with a black puppy along a Shanghai street. It is summer and the child is clothed in a tiny red apron that just covers its stomach. It has been sitting in the dirt.” “Immediately after the Allied troops had pushed their way to the North, I went down to Naples and shut myself up in the house for a whole year of despair.” “It’s fall and the storm rattles the butcher’s signs. The trees on Enghavevej have lost nearly all of their leaves, which almost cover the ground with their yellow and reddish-brown carpet that looks like my mother’s hair when the sun plays in it, and you suddenly discover that it’s not totally black.”

Those are excerpts from writings on Shanghai by Alice Smedley, Naples by Anna Maria Ortese and Copenhagen by Tove Ditlevsen, respectively. Also present in this highly varied and readable volume are sketches and apercus and short stories by Djuna Barnes on Greenwich Village, Virginia Woolf on London, Jean Rhys on Paris and more. The diverse summonings up of cities all over the world are illuminating and compelling.

*

Quick trips:

VIETNAM: Travel Survival Kit, second edition, by Robert Storey (Lonely Planet, $15.95 paper). Everybody seems to want to go to Vietnam these days (my, how times have changed), and for anyone who does go, this book ought to be required reading. Nobody treats difficult destinations better than Lonely Planet. (This isn’t exactly a second edition, incidentally; as the first edition was titled “Vietnam, Laos & Cambodia.” The latter two nations now have their own Lonely Planet guides.)

CITIES OF GOLD: A Journey Across the American Southwest in Coronado’s Footsteps by Douglas Preston (Touchstone/Simon & Schuster, $14 paper). An unusually well-written and engaging example of the following-in-famous-footsteps genre of travel writing--first published in hardcover in 1992. The footsteps in this case are those of the Spanish conquistador Francesco Vasquez de Coronado, the terrain reaches across Arizona and New Mexico (including the portion of the latter state in which the Spaniard found his famous “Seven Cities of Gold”), and the travelers--author Preston and his friend Walter Nelson--are alert, adventurous and amiable.

Books to Go appears the second and fourth week of every month.