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Guided Tours of Hell Novellas Francine Prose 9780060080853 Books

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Guided Tours of Hell Novellas Francine Prose 9780060080853 Books

The title story in this book, a sixty-page novella, is a darkly comic tour-de-force. A minor Jewish-American playwright named Landau attends a Kafka conference in Prague, a seedy affair in a country barely emerging from socialist austerity. His inept reading from his play about Kafka's one-time fiancée is trumped by the anecdotes of Jiri Krakauer, a Holocaust survivor who claims to have had an affair with Kafka's sister Ottla while in the Terezin concentration camp. Jiri serves as an exuberant guide on a tour to Terezin itself, lionized by the others and reveling in it, and telling ever more fanciful stories which become increasingly Kafkaesque. When Landau timidly calls him on some detail, Jiri rounds on him. "You neurotic American guys! Writers and academics and bloodsucking so-called intelligentsia. The dirty truth is, you envy us, you wish it had happened to you. You wish you'd gotten the chance to survive Auschwitz or the Gulag!" Despite the depths of tragedy to which he bears witness, Jiri is a monster, relying on his immunity from criticism as a Holocaust survivor to pursue personal adulation. He reminds me strongly of the protagonist in Ian McEwan's recent SOLAR, who trades on his Nobel Prize and global-warming credentials in much the same way, but Francine Prose's story is more successful because more compact.

The other novella in this book, "Three Pigs in Five Days," is almost three times as long and lacks the concentration of the title story. But it revisits some of the same themes in the friendlier setting of Paris. The protagonist, Nina, works for a much older man, Leo, who edits a travel magazine selling the city to American retirees. She is much more competent and intelligent than she allows herself to be, for she has fallen in love with her boss, and lets him dictate what she does, thinks, and feels. She is "convinced that her whole life, prior to that moment, was a ripped magazine she was leafing through until her appointment with Leo." Leo sends her to Paris on her own, to an abominable hotel run by a former mistress. Nina wanders around disconsolately until she arrives unexpectedly at a private showing at the Rodin Museum, where she has a personal epiphany. "What was sleeping with Leo beside what she'd just experienced, the orgy she'd taken part in, the lustful entwining of bodies and limbs that Rodin set in motion: ecstatic, blissful, unsatisfied still, all these years after his death?"

Leo does eventually arrive, and commandeers Nina for his own agenda, a tour of all the Paris spots associated with death: Cemeteries, the Catacombs, and the Conciergerie, from which the prisoners of the Revolution were taken to the guillotine. Many of these episodes reflect moments in the first story, and Leo is another comic monster in his way. Nina will reach quieter epiphanies that may eventually restore her self-esteem, ending an amusing, thoughtful story that is full of wonderful observations along the way, but is much more difficult to bring to a single focus.


Tags : Guided Tours of Hell: Novellas [Francine Prose] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. The less-than-innocents abroad in these short novels are Americans in Europe, involved in what turn out to be pleasure tours of hell: shocking,Francine Prose,Guided Tours of Hell: Novellas,Harper Perennial,006008085X,FICTION Literary,Fiction,Fiction - General,Fiction Short Stories (single author),Fiction : Literary,FictionLiterary,Literary,Literature: Classics,Short Stories (single author),Short stories

Guided Tours of Hell Novellas Francine Prose 9780060080853 Books Reviews

My Creative Writing professor recommended this book to me, and I flew right through the first of the two novellas. I think it's brilliant---it's hard enough to write about the Holocaust, but it's even harder to do it with a true sense of humor. And though the second novella isn't as strong as the first, the first is so good that I stand by the five stars I'm giving it.
I read these two novellas before I saw the other reviews here on , and its a good thing. It would have been a real shame to have been discouraged or influenced by some of the negative comments. Ms. Prose's voice is unique, her stories well structured and interesting, her characters human. I don't want to spoil these stories for anyone who has yet to read them, so I won't go into the details of the plots. This is the second book by Ms. Prose I have read (Hunters and Gatherers was first) and I am pleased to have discovered her. Paris in the winter can be a gray place, but it is still Paris. Enough said. If you enjoy well crafted, serious fiction you will enjoy these stories (how is that for a loaded sentence?)
This book contains two novellas. The first is a well-crafted study of how charismatic individuals spin history for personal gain, be it social/sexual or material. The fact that the Holocaust is the history being spun is timely and fascinating.
The second is a full length novel that has been unfairly savaged by previous reviewers for being formless, with "thin" characters, unattractive "pathetic" main character etc. etc. Anyone's entitled to his opinion, but I believe these reviewers missed the point. This is an existential story written from the perspective of a woman who is neurotically obsessed with her (older) lover. I think it's brilliantly done. Certainly we know lots of OTHER people who have been in such relationships. Do all romantic heroines have to be heroically self-assertive? What a depressingly narrow range of reader tastes if that is the case! Nina's musings as she flounders in the emotional vortex of her obsessive love for Leo are fascinating and generally close to the mark. Her character is 'thin' because love-obsessed persons are self-absorbed and have a constricted range of expression. That Prose "made Paris boring" is not a criticism, but high praise! The embarassingly simple point is that even the most attractive environment will be sterile and dully malevolent when filtered through the opaque lens of emotional dependency.
I'm so glad I finally got around to Francine Prose's, "Guided Tours of Hell", two novellas that epitomize Prose's talent for searing satire and gob-smacking irony.

"Isn't there something by definition obscene about guided tours of hell - except, of course, if you're Dante?"

"What IS the tourist etiquette for the shaving room at the death camp?"

In the title novella, two aging, male writers clash egos at a Kafka Conference while touring a death camp in Prague.

"Three Pigs in Five Days" follows American travel writer, Nina, around Paris, as she realizes that she has a classic Bad Boyfriend, and that many famous woman have fallen into the same trap. Wondering what she is going to do with this new-found self-awareness is what kept me turning the pages.

Warning, there is nothing Politically Correct in these novellas - that's why they are so good! For example, in "Three Pigs in Five Days", Prose explores the politically incorrect, but often true, reality that women can, and often do, process sex without commitment differently than men do. And that's just one example.
The title story in this book, a sixty-page novella, is a darkly comic tour-de-force. A minor Jewish-American playwright named Landau attends a Kafka conference in Prague, a seedy affair in a country barely emerging from socialist austerity. His inept reading from his play about Kafka's one-time fiancée is trumped by the anecdotes of Jiri Krakauer, a Holocaust survivor who claims to have had an affair with Kafka's sister Ottla while in the Terezin concentration camp. Jiri serves as an exuberant guide on a tour to Terezin itself, lionized by the others and reveling in it, and telling ever more fanciful stories which become increasingly Kafkaesque. When Landau timidly calls him on some detail, Jiri rounds on him. "You neurotic American guys! Writers and academics and bloodsucking so-called intelligentsia. The dirty truth is, you envy us, you wish it had happened to you. You wish you'd gotten the chance to survive Auschwitz or the Gulag!" Despite the depths of tragedy to which he bears witness, Jiri is a monster, relying on his immunity from criticism as a Holocaust survivor to pursue personal adulation. He reminds me strongly of the protagonist in Ian McEwan's recent SOLAR, who trades on his Nobel Prize and global-warming credentials in much the same way, but Francine Prose's story is more successful because more compact.

The other novella in this book, "Three Pigs in Five Days," is almost three times as long and lacks the concentration of the title story. But it revisits some of the same themes in the friendlier setting of Paris. The protagonist, Nina, works for a much older man, Leo, who edits a travel magazine selling the city to American retirees. She is much more competent and intelligent than she allows herself to be, for she has fallen in love with her boss, and lets him dictate what she does, thinks, and feels. She is "convinced that her whole life, prior to that moment, was a ripped magazine she was leafing through until her appointment with Leo." Leo sends her to Paris on her own, to an abominable hotel run by a former mistress. Nina wanders around disconsolately until she arrives unexpectedly at a private showing at the Rodin Museum, where she has a personal epiphany. "What was sleeping with Leo beside what she'd just experienced, the orgy she'd taken part in, the lustful entwining of bodies and limbs that Rodin set in motion ecstatic, blissful, unsatisfied still, all these years after his death?"

Leo does eventually arrive, and commandeers Nina for his own agenda, a tour of all the Paris spots associated with death Cemeteries, the Catacombs, and the Conciergerie, from which the prisoners of the Revolution were taken to the guillotine. Many of these episodes reflect moments in the first story, and Leo is another comic monster in his way. Nina will reach quieter epiphanies that may eventually restore her self-esteem, ending an amusing, thoughtful story that is full of wonderful observations along the way, but is much more difficult to bring to a single focus.