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Postcards from Absurdistan

Prague at the End of History

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Postcards from Absurdistan

By: Derek Sayer
Narrated by: Daniel Henning
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About this listen

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
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Excellent book but atrocious narration

Would it have been so difficult for the production company to spend two hours instructing the narrator on how to read the Czech alphabet, which happens to be phonetical, hence very easy to master? As it is, the names are mangled to the point that they are at times incomprehensible. It is quite infuriating to have such a remarkable book disserviced in such a way. And what does it say about our Western contempt for the "Oriental"? Fuming.

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