autobiographical novel
In-House Weddings
. “
He is also in a
beer perfume, and then slowly we made love and then again.
The only thing I heard was the beat of my heart, the aroma
of beer around me, the aroma of beer on my lover. I felt I
was swimming in a pool filled with beer, in a huge keg of
pilsner...” Had Hrabal come up with that passage after a night
in the Golden Tiger? It seemed likely, given how strongly the
place reeks of the golden stuff. Fresh air begins to sound like
a good idea.
As the sun sets, I head to a place where Praguers have
been breathing deeply for years: Petřín Hill. It’s a stunning
vantage point: from a steep incline, Petřín’s orchards and
green spaces overlook the ochre rooftops of the Old Town,
with Prague Castle at eye level — and seemingly at arm’s
reach — just to the left of the frame.
“
To sit [...] on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be
back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring — it was
peace,” wrote the novelist Milan Kundera, whose best-
known work,
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
,
lovingly
describes the view from Petřín: “On her way up, she paused
several times to look back: below her she saw the towers and
bridges, the saints were shaking their fists and lifting their
stone eyes to the clouds.”
Refreshed by the oxygen and the views, it’s time to
venture back down, passing the stately Café Savoy (
ambi.
cz
),
a renovated grand coffee house of the
mitteleuropäisch
(
central European) old school — and one which I have often
associated with Franz Kafka, who recorded watching several
Yiddish theatre performances at a place called Café Savoy in
his journals. What I hadn’t realised was that Kafka had been
writing about a very different location — not this one by the
river, but another back in Old Town.
I find it at the end of a small street in Josefov, the
old Jewish district. For years, the site had housed a bar
called Česká Hospoda, but earlier this year it changed
owners, emerging as a sleek, new restaurant called Katr
(
katrrestaurant.cz
).
The drama now takes place at the
U Zlatého Tygra
is known for
being the long-term
haunt of novelist
Bohumil Hrabal
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