The Prague Orgy
The Nathan Zuckerman Series, Book 4
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Narrated by:
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Malcolm Hillgartner
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By:
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Philip Roth
About this listen
In quest of the unpublished manuscript of a martyred Yiddish writer, the American novelist Nathan Zuckerman travels to Soviet-occupied Prague in the mid-1970s. There, in a nation straightjacketed by totalitarian Communism, he discovers a literary predicament, marked by institutionalized oppression, that is rather different from his own. He also discovers, among the oppressed writers with whom he quickly becomes embroiled in a series of bizarre and poignant adventures, an appealingly perverse kind of heroism.
The Prague Orgy, consisting of entries from protagonist Nathan Zuckerman's notebooks recording his sojourn among these outcast artists, completes the Nathan Zuckerman series. It provides a startling ending to Roth's intricately designed magnum opus on the unforeseen consequences of art.
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The world renowned author of The Satanic Verses and The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Salman Rushdie is a Whitbread Award winner and recipient of the Booker Prize. His first truly American novel, Fury is a metaphorically rich black comedy that reflects the pressure-cooker of modern life. Malik Solanka, irascible doll-maker and retired historian of ideas, suffers the pain of wanting without knowing exactly what it is he wants.
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surprisingly good
- By David on 11-21-07
By: Salman Rushdie
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The Immigrants
- By: Howard Fast
- Narrated by: full cast
- Length: 13 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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This is a love story of great beauty and great tenderness, the kind of love story that entangles the listener in the lives of the characters, so that after the story is over, one continues to live with those characters. And fortunately, the listener will not have to say farewell to these characters, since it is the first in a series that will tell the story of three Californian families over the course of the 20th century.
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Narration style kills the story.
- By Glynis on 11-27-14
By: Howard Fast
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Marina and Lee
- The Tormented Love and Fatal Obsession Behind Lee Harvey Oswald's Assassination of John F. Kennedy
- By: Priscilla Johnson McMillan
- Narrated by: R.C. Bray, Joseph Finder
- Length: 24 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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Marina and Lee is one of the best and truest audiobooks about the Kennedy assassination. Priscilla Johnson McMillan came to the story with a unique knowledge of the two main characters. In the 1950s she knew Kennedy well for a time when he was hospitalized with Addison's disease. She talked to him frequently, brought him books, knew his wife, and formed a strong opinion of the sort of man he was. What is astonishing is that she also knew Lee Harvey Oswald.
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Now I know why he did it
- By Rodd on 06-09-14
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The Zahir
- By: Paulo Coelho
- Narrated by: Derek Jacobi, Emilia Fox
- Length: 5 hrs and 16 mins
- Abridged
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It begins with a glimpse or a passing thought. It ends in obsession. One day a renowned author discovers that his wife, a war correspondent, has disappeared leaving no trace. Though time brings more success and new love, he remains mystified - and increasingly fascinated - by her absence. Was she kidnapped, blackmailed, or simply bored with their marriage? The unrest she causes is as strong as the attraction she exerts.
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Beautiful and deep read!
- By Top 1% Buyer on 09-13-15
By: Paulo Coelho
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Things I've Been Silent About
- By: Azar Nafisi
- Narrated by: Naila Azad
- Length: 13 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Azar Nafisi, author of the beloved international best seller Reading Lolita in Tehran, now gives us a stunning personal story of growing up in Iran, memories of her life lived in thrall to a powerful and complex mother, against the background of a country's political revolution.
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Family portrait in the frame of history
- By Galina COS on 07-02-16
By: Azar Nafisi
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The Captain and the Enemy
- By: Graham Greene
- Narrated by: Kenneth Branagh
- Length: 3 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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Victor was only 12 when the Captain took him away from school to live with Liza, his girlfriend. He claimed that Victor, now reborn as Jim Smith, had been won as the result of a bet. Having reached his 20s, Jim attempts to piece together the story.
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"Who is This King Kong?"
- By Mel on 07-07-12
By: Graham Greene
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The Noise of Time
- By: Julian Barnes
- Narrated by: Daniel Philpott
- Length: 5 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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In May 1937, a man in his early 30s waits by the lift of a Leningrad apartment block. He waits all through the night, expecting to be taken away to the Big House. Any celebrity he has known in the previous decade is no use to him now, and few who are taken to the Big House ever return.
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Art belongs to everybody and nobody.
- By Darwin8u on 06-13-16
By: Julian Barnes
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BUtterfield 8
- By: John O'Hara, Lorin Stein - introduction
- Narrated by: Gretchen Mol
- Length: 8 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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A masterpiece of American fiction and a best seller upon its publication in 1935, BUtterfield 8 lays bare with brash honesty the unspoken and often shocking truths that lurked beneath the surface of a society still reeling from the effects of the Great Depression. One Sunday morning, Gloria wakes up in a stranger's apartment with nothing but a torn evening dress, stockings, and panties. When she steals a fur coat from the wardrobe to wear home, she unleashes a series of events that can only end in tragedy.
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Wildly Uneven
- By David P on 08-27-15
By: John O'Hara, and others
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The End of the Affair
- By: Graham Greene
- Narrated by: Colin Firth
- Length: 6 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Graham Greene’s evocative analysis of the love of self, the love of another, and the love of God is an English classic that has been translated for the stage, the screen, and even the opera house. Academy Award-winning actor Colin Firth (The King’s Speech, A Single Man) turns in an authentic and stirring performance for this distinguished audio release.
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Colin Firth Kills It
- By Em on 05-09-12
By: Graham Greene
What listeners say about The Prague Orgy
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- The Mindfulness Guru
- 09-19-21
A good read, though minor Roth
A characteristically thoughtful and well-written novella, The Prague Orgy is a fast and easy read, describing Roth’s now well-known trip to Prague when the city was controlled by the Soviets, but flickers of light were planted by the author. The book is full Roth: sometimes unrestrained, but tightly worded. The narrator, Malcolm Hillgartner, is
outstanding, his voice passionate and full.
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- Michael Convery
- 12-28-19
sketched Czechs. like notes for a better novel
After enjoying the first three short novels of the Zuckermann tetralogy, I eagerly began this one, especially after reading in a Roth interview that the idea for The Prague Orgy was the origin of the series.
However, this novella left me underwhelmed. While The Prague Orgy was the original idea for the Zuckermann tetralogy, by the time Roth reaches this epilogue, all of the energy built up over the previous novels has gone, but not because of a lack of interesting potential. Why is this book so very short? I'm not asking for War and Peace, but the material of the book could have easily filled another novel the length of The Ghost Writer, Zuckermann Unbound, or the The Anatomy Lesson. This novella skims by several characters, giving them each a poignant moment, but nothing else and barely even that. The reader meets nobody with the vitality of Lonoff, Amy Bellette, Alvin Pepler, Caesarea O'Shea...
In the The Anatomy Lesson, there is a wonderful section focused on the character of Jaga, an immigrant from communist Poland, which I thought was a preview for what The Prague Orgy would be, and I now think should have been. Go read that section in the Anatomy Lesson, and see if you can find a section in The Prague Orgy with comparable power. The sketched Czechs in this book deserved more .
As for the character of Zuckermann himself, he's barely there even though he's the main character. Gone is the hilarious Zuckermann near the end of The Anatomy Lesson, doped up on pain-killers and vodka, pretending to be a freedom fighting pornographer. Yes, it makes sense for Zuckermann to have been dialed down after having spent the previous novel trying to get away from himself and his life. But even dialed down as he was in The Ghost Writer or in Unbound, he was still a poignant funny character who could delight with short bursts of sardonic one line responses. In this novel, the main character could remain anonymous and the reader wouldn't know it's Zuckermann except for instances in which the other characters blunty say it.
All in all, this novella feels like notes for a potentially better Roth novel. The material was there, the set up was there, but Roth didn't give enough effort to bring it to life.
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- Tim Bishop
- 01-03-24
Meh
Not poorly written just seemed very thin on substance. I was hoping for more I guess.
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- Darwin8u
- 05-08-18
One’s story isn’t a skin to be shed...
“One’s story isn’t a skin to be shed— it’s inescapable, one’s body and blood. You go on pumping it out till you die, the story veined with the themes of your life, the ever-recurring story that’s at once your invention and the invention of you.”
- Philip Roth, The Prague Orgy
Today has been quite a Roth day. I went to Temple Solel in Paradise Valley this AM to hear Dr. Brian Goodman speak on the secret Czech files on Philip Roth. Roth visited Czechoslovakia four times between 1972 and 1976 and was eventually kicked out for good. He was kicked out primarily for 1) hanging with dissident Czech writers (Ivan Klíma, Milan Kundera, Ludvík Vaculík), 2) his work publishing dissident Czech (and other Eastern Block writers through Penguin's Writers from The Other Europe, 3) and his work getting money to Czech writers and attention to them through PEN.
Anyway, the Zuckerman Unbound tetrology (The Ghost Writer*, Zuckerman Unbound, The Anatomy Lesson, and The Prague Orgy) were all impacted with Roth's involvement with Czech writers and the post 1968 "Normalization" in Czechoslovakia. Roth's historical imagination was captured, and his writing was expanded. Roth might have been a completely different writer without his exposure and involvement with Czechoslovakia in the 70s.
As a reader of American fiction and a lover of Roth's writing, knowing what came after this period sent chills down my spine. Not only did Roth write his great navel gazing novels (see Zuckerman Bound, but he ended up writing some of the best American Fiction EVER. He grew, matured, and started hitting home runs (Operation Shylock: A Confession (93), Sabbath's Theatre (97), American Pastoral (98), The Human Stain (00)). Wow!
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8 people found this helpful
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- Hannah
- 07-20-21
Independently good - but not our Zuckerman
I enjoyed this novella, after reading the Ghost Writer, Zuckerman Unbound and the Anatomy Lesson.
It's billed as an epilogue to the series, but really it serves as an independent story that could have happened at any point throughout the trilogy, and doesn't tell us much about Zuckerman or his character development - it really is much more about it's own Prague based plot and the strange characters he meets.
In fact, you could change Zuckerman's name to Cohen, and it wouldn't matter.
So read it, read it out of order or upsidedown, enjoy it for what it is, a profound and edgy interpretation of the human condition as all Roth's works are, but don't expect any closure or resolution to the trilogy.
As for the narration, well, it's Hillgartner, and he as always, terrific.
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- Massha
- 06-19-23
brilliant and scathing
So now, in his quest of himself and that freedom, Nathan Zuckerman travels into a socialist country. He is on a quest to retrieve a manuscript, held hostage by the deranged ex-wife of some airbag Czech emigre author. He is now confronted with the oppression so far unknown to him. He escapes with his life but [spoiler] the manuscript is lost forever. [/spoiler]
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- mojorand
- 05-20-23
Even Philip Roth Can Write A Stinker
Short and uninspired. I bought it because I wanted to feel as if I finished The Zuckerman Trilogy, this being the epilogue. But besides the presence of the Nathan, it had little to do with the three titles that preceded it.
Abundant depraved sex worked brilliantly in Sabbath’s Theater. In this novella it was a boring placeholder for an actual plot.
This throwaway should be a free title for Audible members.
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- Jay Jarvis
- 03-22-19
crude and boring
Roth is a great writer and I have enjoyed many of his books. But not this one.
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1 person found this helpful