Commies, crooks, gypsies, spooks & poets : thirteen books of Prague in the year of the Great Lice Epidemic /

Novak is Czech-born and now a resident of the U.S. With his family--wife, daughter, and son--he spent a year once again living in Prague, beginning in July_ 1992. This was a pivotal time in Czech history--the Iron Curtain falling down as if made of gauze after all, Czechoslovakia embarking on freedom and a market economy, then dividing into separate Czech and Slovak republics. Novak's book is a collection of essays about his and his family's experiences as temporary residents in the splendid Czech capital. Czechs were disoriented during those heady but uncertain times; tourists came not in a trickle but in a flood to enjoy Prague's well-preserved baroqueness. Novak's children learned to speak Czech and had a great time in school and at play, and his writing went well, providing him with a decent living--these things he talks about, and more. This is history told in you-are-there style as well as sharp travel writing. --Brad Hooper

Prague, when Novak got there in July 1992, was aswarm with pickpockets, drug addicts, bohemian Americans and returning Czech émigrés like himself. Speculators, real estate sharpies, advertising gurus, porno pushers and ministers with blatant conflicts of interest were making fortunes. Stressed out by the end of communism, Prague residents coped with bureaucracy, corruption and a head-lice epidemic while ferreting out ``spooks'' (former state security agents) and plainclothes informers. Novak, a Chicago-based American novelist, was born in Czechoslovakia in 1953 and spent his first 16 years there. The recent year he spent in Prague with his Czech-born wife and their two children yielded this pungent, irreverent look at a society struggling toward rebirth. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

This exuberant account of life in post-Communist Czechoslovakia by one of its colorful prodigal sons reads much like a grand extension of its breathless title, but it fails to sustain the same punch and humor. Czech-born Novak (The Willys Dream Kit, 1985, etc.) has been in the United States for so long and is so Americanized that he now writes in English rather than Czech. Yet Czechoslovakia's Velvet Revolution has evoked in him a healthy dose of reflection on contemporary American life and a deep-rooted curiosity about post- Communist Eastern Europe. Novak's return to Prague with wife and two children in tow reveals familiar faces and ways as well as an unstable society in the process of reinvention. With the exception of an incident involving lice (confirming that one only truly fathoms another culture through children), many of the situations and individuals Novak discusses are already familiar to us from the mass media. These ritual encounters include buying a used car from a provincial wheeler-dealer; chasing down a gypsy pickpocket on the Charles Bridge; and battling inebriated crowds at a soccer match. The author is foremost a satirist and humorist. His tactic here is to relate his family's adventures as if he were telling their tales over several rounds of Pilsner beer in a rowdy Prague beer hall. The result is a combination of brief, uninsightful reflections and lengthier, more successful accounts of incidents and personalities, especially of the writer Bohumil Hrabal and the photographer Antoníin Kratochvil. Among the more irritating and telling quirks of Novak's style is his practice of stringing together capitalized words in a form of shorthand, describing Vaclav Havel, for instance, as ``a Coyote-in-the-Henhouse Playful President.'' Some unusual insights, but too often simply more of the familiar stories picked up by journalists, related in an excessively talkative style.