Farewell to Prague

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.»