Postcards from Absurdistan

Prague at the End of History

De: Derek Sayer

Narrado por: Daniel Henning

Postcards from Absurdistan is a cultural and political history of Prague from 1938, when the Nazis destroyed Czechoslovakia's artistically vibrant liberal democracy, to 1989, when the country's socialist regime collapsed after more than four decades of communist dictatorship. Derek Sayer shows that Prague's twentieth century, far from being a story of inexorable progress toward some "end of history," whether fascist, communist, or democratic, was a tragicomedy of recurring nightmares played out in a land Czech dissidents dubbed Absurdistan. Situated in the eye of the storms that shaped the modern world, Prague holds up an unsettling mirror to the absurdities and dangers of our own times.

In a brilliant narrative, Sayer weaves a vivid montage of the lives of individual Praguers—poets and politicians, architects and athletes, journalists and filmmakers, artists, musicians, and comedians—caught up in the crosscurrents of the turbulent half century following the Nazi invasion. This is the territory of the ideologist, the collaborator, the informer, the apparatchik, the dissident, the outsider, the torturer, and the refugee—not to mention the innocent bystander who is always looking the other way, and Václav Havel's greengrocer whose knowing complicity allows the show to go on. Prague exposes modernity's dream worlds of progress as confections of kitsch.

©2022 Princeton University Press (P)2022 Tantor

Enchanting book, but very poor Czech pronunciation

Derek Sayer is a brilliant historian, and this is a major and beautifully written work from him. The text is very well-organized, and weaves in numerous captivating personal and societal stories amidst a deep dive into Prague's literary and general history. Truly essential for anyone with an interest in Czech literature and history. The narration, however, is another story, and I don't think it's entirely the fault of the narrator, who has a very clear, pleasant voice with a decent amount of expressiveness. When narrating the English-language text, he does a good job. But the narrator simply cannot pronounce Czech names and places properly. If you are a Czech speaker, this can become extremely frustrating and off-putting. There were many times I physically cringed, and sometimes couldn't even figure out at first what the narrator was referring to, the pronunciation was so bad. The producers owed it to the author, the audience, and the narrator to either coach the narrator to provide an at-least-adequate Czech pronunciation, or insert another narrator when it came time to speak the Czech names properly. Instead, the production felt to me culturally insulting, as if Czech were some faraway language, of which the producers knew nothing, and therefore they had no obligation to ensure it was pronounced properly out of respect for Czech-speaking listeners. I'm still very glad I stayed with the book, despite the many moments of "ouch!" in the pronunciation, because Sayer tells a richly detailed, powerful story and does it magnificently.