Farewell to Prague

by Desmond Hogan

Following a crippling depression and institutionalization, the writer "Desmond" wanders from his native Dublin around an increasingly unrecognizable Europe, and as far as the southern United States, assembling a patchwork of small stories, conversations, love affairs, memories, regrets, and confrontations: "the labyrinth of stories of people whose lives you touch . . . so that your mind becomes like a polychromatic Irish pub." Whether a series of tragic postcards, a cubist novel, or a memoir shorn of its connective tissue, A Farewell to Prague stands as Desmond Hogan's greatest achievement: a catalog of the moments that justify a life--or shine a light on its emptiness.

Genres: Novels, Fiction, Irish Literature

245 pages, Paperback

First published June 18, 2013

Reviews

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very striking polyphonic novel written in fragments of travelogue, baroquely descriptive sentences of photostatic recall, and autofictional encounters with past travelling companions, lovers, and friends. The result is a marvellous tapestry of wanderlust, a struggle for acceptance, and the shedding of traumas in a shapeshifting Europe in the last leg of the 20th century, composed with a poetic exactitude and a quietly haunting despair—in the same wheelhouse as W.G. Sebald and Aidan Higgins.

[Pádraig Mac Oscair · Rating 5 out of 5]

The other great Irish fiction writer who charted the transition from the old Ireland to the new, John McGahern, once opined that "Ireland went from the 19th century directly to the 21st, skipping the twentieth". Desmond Hogan's writing charted similar territory to McGahern's in this respect, with a body of work from 1976's The Ikon Maker to 1995's A Farewell to Prague which now reads almost as a set of snapshots of a society where the repression wrought by Catholicism and conversative nationalism was eroding in the context of The Troubles and the arrival of a new, Anglo-American youth culture brought about by television and pop music from the 1960s onwards. However, despite his early work having a major impact in Ireland and elsewhere, Hogan had already dwindled into near-obscurity by the time this novel was published. It sold fewer than 5,000 copies in its first edition, a remarkable decline for someone who had been talked of as a contemporary of Salman Rushdie and Kasao Ishiguro a decade earlier. A period of homelessness followed this book's publication, before his publisher managed to track Hogan down living remotely in the West of Ireland and provide modest financial support to limit his slide into destitution. Well-received new volumes of short fiction have accompanied occasional minor resurgences of interest in his work and the reissues of his then-popular early novels.

However, a cursory name search online is far more likely to bring up a court appearance after Hogan was convicted for exposing himself to a minor in 2006. Interviews and public appearances have been few and far between before and since, leaving this book as the best available source from which to piece together what happened to him to make him foresake a once-promising career.

The novel makes much more sense when read knowing that context. This isn't so much a novel as an autobiography in fragments, loosely narrating Hogan's life as a nonlinear series of impressions and anecdotes spanning from growing up in Ballinasloe in the 1950s to navigating a world that had become strange and alien to him in the aftermath of the changes wrought by the 1980s, in particular the increasingly lonely life of a gay man at the peak of the AIDS crisis. Some of these fragments are short stories in themselves, others a mere sentence or two. The effect they have when read together is more that of reading a diary than a story. Tiny flashes of insight derived from the harshness and hypocrisy of the Ireland of Hogan's youth breaking through as he comes to realise in the years after escaping that these conditions of isolation and ostracism for society's marginalised are eternal and there is to be no escape, as the optimistic, expansive times of the 1970s give way to the contracting horizons of the 80s and 90s, when AIDS had destroyed a generation of gay men and the world became a much more commercial place in which people became ever less free.

Hogan was 44 when this came out and has not published another novel since. McGahern, by contrast, had still to publish his own two great, and radical in their own right, reckonings with how Ireland had changed in his lifetime, Amongst Women and That They May Face The Rising Sun at that age. McGahern died as a much celebrated figure in 2006, whereas Hogan's work flits in and out of print. Read together, these writers provide outwardly different but equally important portraits of an Ireland in flux, and those who were victims of it.

[Eddie Watkins]

Seemingly available now from Dalkey.