A Romantic Education

by Patricia Hampl

Book Overview

Golden Prague seemed mostly gray when Patricia Hampl first went there in quest of her Czech heritage. In that bleak time, no one could have predicted the political upheaval awaiting Communist Europe and the city of Kafka and Rilke. Hampl's subsequent memoir, a brilliant evocation of Czech life under socialism, attained the stature of living history, and added to our understanding not only of Central Europe but also of what it means to be engaged in...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0393319059
• ISBN13: 9780393319057
• Release Date: June 1999
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Length: 349 Pages
• Weight: 0.78 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.1" x 8.7"

Customer Reviews

affirmation

Being of eastern European descent, I found Hampl's book revealing and intriguing as it spoke of what my grandparents often alluded to when referring to "the old country." I felt myself travelling with her, trying to find out something, anything, about my roots.

A tale of two cities

Elegant, meditative, and special, Patrica Hampl's memoir of growing up in St. Paul and visiting her ancestral home of Prague deservedly won her a Macarthur genius grant, and remains a classic of its genre. When it was published in the early 80s, the gorgeous Bohemian captial of Prague was sheltered from the American line of vision by the Iron Curtain, and much less familiar to American readers than it is today; Hampl's book details her trip in the 70s to that loveliest of cities to visit her family's origins and learn something about her place in the world. But the book is also a beautiful meditation on another exceptionally romantic, and often still neglected, city, Hampl's hometown of St. Paul, Minnesota. Stunningly situated on the high bluffs overlooking a chasmic portion of the Mississippi, the home of F. Scott Fitzgerald and the Empire Builder James J. Hill, St. Paul has declined in cultural significance over the decades, overshadowed by its younger and more prosperous twin city across the river. But Hampl lovingly evokes what it was like to live in this atmospheric city of decaying Victorian mansions overlooking the downtown from the heights of Summit Avenue, both as a grandchild of Czech immigrants working as servants for the enmansed and as a young woman striking out as a student and a writer. It's an unusual, romantically-staurated memoir.

Elegant and lyrical

I first read Patricia Hampl's I Could Tell You Stories when I took a 1st person essay writing class, and all of us in the class became instant fans. Her book provoked endless discussions about the reliability (or Unreliability) of memory and the role it plays in memoir writing. Hampl's A Romantic Education allows us to continue following her down her chosen path as she returns to Prague in search of her heritage during the gray pall of socialism. This edition of A Romantic Education is a reissue following the Velvet Revolution and is full of richly nuanced detail that we have come to expect from Hampl. It's an elegant piece of writing that allows us to taste and dabble in the trickling stream of history running beneath the surface of the everlasting riddle of personal memory.