Cities in a Raw Young Century

Perhaps the most incisive image of Tehran that Bellaigue uncovers in this arid, dispiriting book is a framed blank space. When Parastu attempts to mount an exhibition in Tehran that she had recently staged with success in Berlin—provocative photographs of a bald man bedecked in an embroidered chador—the Intelligence Ministry intervenes, “deem[ing] them at odds with the official designation of the chador as the most virtuous feminine garment.” The exhibition is summarily cancelled, but, Bellaigue notes, “Parastu’s opening went ahead and the public found the walls of the gallery bare except for frames that had contained photographs of a bald head.” Theocratic obstinence begets protest art, and Tehran’s citizens come to look, hungry for some reminder of the city’s cosmopolitan past and lamely seeking what meagre respite they can from its otherwise calcified future.

Time has atrophied in Tehran; in Prague, it beats on, awkwardly straddling ten centuries of experience as the city itself straddles the Vltava River, Myla Goldberg suggests. But the twentieth century has claimed from Prague much of its well-aged charm: world wars, Nazis, Soviets, generations of clod-headed town planners of every stripe, and now clumsy, greedy capitalists have made and destroyed and remade the city into a monument-strewn amusement park for its indifferent citizens and easily pleased tourists. The latter group’s satisfaction results from Prague’s hammy conversion of history and culture into consumables and postcards. Its cobblestone streets and Gothic, Renaissance, baroque, and art nouveau architecture today provide pathways and storefronts for the gluttonous best of the West: “a T.G.I. Friday’s inhabits an eighteenth-century mansion; signs posted on elegant antique streetlamps display the word casino in Czech, English, Japanese, and Hebrew; a fourteenth-century boulevard contains a McDonald’s, a Pizza Hut, and numerous discos,” writes Goldberg.

This is but one of the many epic lists of the city’s “spectacular street mélange of consumer culture, international tourism, and incipient capitalism” on offer in Time’s Magpie: A Walk in Prague. These inventories, while clever and critical, overwhelm this slim meditation from Myla Goldberg, an otherwise thoughtful American novelist who returns to Prague to check on its progress ten years after westernization first took hold. The evidence she brings back is as brazenly ugly as the graffiti sprayed across the city’s ancient buildings, and as casually distasteful as the images of cavorting naked women that serve as backdrops for children’s carnival rides in a city park.

Goldberg is insightful when she moves beyond cataloguing the crass excesses of post-Cold War Eastern Europe to contemplate the vestigial Soviet bureaucratic culture that clogs the city’s public buildings and services; or when she covers the gimpy, sparse protests against the war in Iraq that take place in city squares that have for centuries hosted major historical events; or when she turns up examples of brutality in Prague over the past century. Visiting the city’s statuesque burial grounds, potted with obelisks to celebrated Czechs of the near and distant past, the graves of Kafka, Dvorák, and others are not nearly as affecting as the blank headstones dating to the 1930s that Goldberg finds in the New Jewish Cemetery—so many stark reminders of diverted lives.

Goldberg’s Prague, like Mehta’s Bombay and Bellaigue’s Tehran, often seems to be “half-joke and half-dream.” These cities curry our desire for the familiar chaos of places like Rome, so neatly captured in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, as “a moderate, tranquil jungle where one can hide well.” Bombay, Tehran, Prague, the tumid cityscapes of the new century, offer no such refuge. Their citizens are awash in the roiling waves of religion and politics and history and money and sex and death that surge through their boulevards, bazaars, and back alleys. Crowded in by strangers and kin, tricksters and killers, those who endure turn to the old human verities of hope and desire and still more hope. So outfitted, they wait for the city to make good on its eternal promise: that daily temptation of a better life.