Prague Pictures: Portraits of a City

This is a fine little book covering a city that is Greek, no Czech, to me. Banville keeps what might have been a boring book very interesting. He intersperses history, biography, and his personal experiences, at a good pace. There are detailed footnotes to explain intricacies of history which he could not easily fit into the main text. That is why the book is relatively small and short. I had read Banville's fictional biography of Kepler just before reading this book, so his information on Kepler, most of it, given again here in this book, I had already digested It was good, nonetheless, to have the review, supplemented by much more information on Rudolph II, the king, and Tycho Brahe. The difficulty of a non-speaker of the native language, as Banville is, was made quite clear in several places, but especially when he was assigned to chair a meeting at a writer's conference in Prague. It was a trying time for him, because most of the interactions were in Czech. He had immediate translations through his headphones, but it was still difficult to understand exactly what the Czech speakers were saying. Thus, for a person who does not speak Czech, Banville knows a great deal about the country, and Prague's, literary, artistic, architectural, and scientific history. His references are duly noted at the end of the book.