Amerikai Magyar Hírlap, 2003 (15. évfolyam, 4-49. szám)
2003-05-09 / 19. szám
AMERICAN Hungarian Journal Celebrating the Written Word PHOTOREPORT BY SUSAN JANCSO Part 2. L.A. TIMES FESTIVAL OF BOOKS. 2003 Budapest - the new hangout for Hemingway-like expatriates in Arthur Phillips: prague Just like this, lower case, with the “g” in italics. Original and brilliant as it is, Arthur Phillips’ new novel is being compared to generation-defining novels by Hemingway and Milan Kundera. For a first book, the sheer quantity of rave reviews is impressive and promising of a bright literary future. As Pat Conroy, author of The Prince of Tides puts it: “Arthur Phillips ’s bold and ambitious novel, Prague, is one of those rare books that help define and identify a whole generation, in the same way that Hemingway ’s The Sun Also Rises introduced his lost generation. ” I met Arthur towards the end of the first day, at a 90-minute session with authors of first novels in fiction. The others were Hari Kunzu, Nicole Krauss, Jonathan Safran Foer and Jay Basu, with Mark Rozzo as moderator. During the discussion, I heard Hungary mentioned, so 1 walked up to him after the session and asked him about it. Arthur told me that in spite of the title, the story was played out in Budapest. I suddenly remembered that I had seen and cut out an article about this for further research. Now I had the perfect chance to do it. I proceeded to buy the book, and by Sunday 1 was ready with my questions which the author graciously answered.- Mr. Phillips, what in the world were you doing in Budapest? And, by the way, is the book autobiographical?- Between 1990 and 1992, I made my living in Budapest as an executive assistant, a real estate developer, a jazz musician, a distributor of Minnesota-distilled vodka, a condom liquidator and a repo man. It was that kind of a place then. As to the second question, the answer is yes and no. I wrote this book to exorcise my obsessive love for this city. I wrote it out of affection for my own past, although I surgically excised myself from the final product.- Tell me about the Budapest you knew, the land of opportunities right after the change of regime in Hungary.- The diverse Westerners who moved to Budapest, Hungary after the fall of Communism shared one peculiar feature: they were buzzingly and weirdly conscious of their moment in History. The tiniest little investment bank trainee, girdled with that most American of credentials, the MBA, spoke openly of a gold rush to the Wild, Wild East, of the virtuous democratizing power of investment, of capitalism’s recent empirical and inevitable triumph, as if History had just completed a 75-year, double-blind, controlled test with Capitalism trumping both Communism and the placebo. Glowing young diplomats were wide-eyed and grinning, as they were clutching a forty-five-year-old lottery ticket the day Containment’s lucky number came up. Now they would witness and administer a new Marshall Plan, draft constitutions, hold the righteous pens indelibly redrawing'the continental map. Artists and would-be bohemians drowsily stepped off their Swissair flights and, that same night, in the smoke and din of a café, remarked on 1990 Budapest’s uncanny parallels to 1920s Paris. Soon The New York Times would confirm this (although, infuriatingly, they would use Bohemian Prague as the new bohemia instead). Even if you had no personality at all, or were still deciding among several, this was the place to be. Posing and dancing in all this History (real Soviet soldiers!) couldn’t help but give you some sort of allure. May 9, 2003 13 AMERIKAI Magyar Ifíriap The top of Powell Library Jay Basu and Jonathan Safran Foer signing books A young reader got her face painted on campus. A little boy frolicking with a „Reading by 9” bookbag A young woman pondering the words of Deepak Chopra UCLA’s fabled Royce Hall, home of the grand theater and many language departments- In answer to a question on this morning's panel, "Coming of Age," you said it would have been a luxury to think about the great questions of existence when in the company of people who have been tortured by two subsequent regimes.- For some people I knew, the ear-popping pressure of so much history and self-consciousness made it hard to get up in the morning, to justify your lunch, let alone your existence. What does it mean to tell a girl you ache for her as the two of you stand in front of a building with bullet holes in it? What does it mean to fret about your fledgling and blatantly temporary career when the man next to Arthur Phillips with Susan Jancso and her books you managed to get himself tortured by the secret police of two different regimes? How do you compare your short and uneventful life to the lives of those who actually rebelled, fought, died, sinned? Does the present owe a debt to the past? Will this place be remembered, and me with it? Maybe this would all feel more real if I were elsewhere... But who do I talk to about this, when the only language everyone seems to speak is cast-iron irony? Prague makes absolutely no headway in answering these prickly questions, thank heaven.- Why call a novel set in Budapest „Prague"?- The Czech capital offered far more stunning architecture than its Hungarian neighbor, and got credit for hosting more important artists and better economic prospects than Budapest. To John Price, a young man who aspires to Life, but only leads a life, Prague glows - the place where Real Life carouses, a party where you were expected an hour ago while, hour after maddening hour, you can’t button your dreamily unwieldy shirt. John Price (the novel’s hero) is not the only one who suspects that the real action is still ahead, in Prague, in the next city, the next job, the next beautiful stranger’s bed. Or (far, far more troubling) that Life is unbearably, permanently out of reach, trapped in the amber of some heirloom era like 1920’s Paris. In Prague, the present limps to a sorry third-place finish, far behind the potential glories of the future and the fairytale splendor of the past. That the actual city of Prague resembles the lovely, ghostly setting of a dimly recalled and yearningly significant fairytale is no mean coincidence.- When the topic of Hungary comes up with Americans, you usually find that they had a Hungarian boyfriend who taught them the words of love, or, in the case of men, a Hungarian girlfriend who cooked Chicken Paprikash for them. I heard you talk about family, a new baby, and you also mentioned a brotherin-law who could read the copy of Amerikai Magyar Hírlap I gave you. Did you, by any chance, marry a Hungarian girl?- No, I did not. It is my sister’s husband who is Hungarian. After he answered all my questions, I thanked Mr. Phillips for the conversation and asked to take a picture. Someone offered to take a picture of us together. To show you what a generous soul Arthur is, he held up my books for the photo, the connection being that one has UCLA on the cover, and the other has Paris in the title - the city where the author lives with his wife and child. Susan Jancso, Hollywood, April 28, 2003
