The Reader Travels

My third review for the The Armchair Traveler Reading Challenge takes us to the Eastern European city of Prague in the Bohemian land now known as the Czech Republic.

Originally published in 1891, The Witch of Prague, by F. Marion Crawford, gives us a picture of Prague rife with history, alchemy and images of architecture that still stands today. For a book written over a hundred years ago, the language is engaging and fluid, more action than description.

It does get pretty melodramatic, though, especially in the latter chapters. At times I felt like I was watching the action on a stage. The scene would open, the drama would unfold, and the scene would close, curtains dropping, adding to the mystery.

The story plays on the juxtaposition of science and mysticism which underlies Prague’s historical obsession with alchemy. The title character, whose name is Unorna, is known as a witch, and her talent lies in her ability to hypnotize people at will. There’s a whole discourse on the popular psychology of the day, speaking of hypnotism in scientific terms even as the nuns fear her talent as something granted by the devil.

Unorna works with a bearded little man named Keyork Arabian trying to find the key to immortality, which is Keyork’s life obsession. This search for the “elixir of life” is their secret as Unorna travels a journey of her own, falling in love with a man we know only as The Traveler. Her goal is to have him as her own, even if it means hypnotizing him into loving her.

I found the racism to be a little disconcerting in this book. The Devil is represented by a short Arab, while God is a tall old white man. One of Unorna’s victims is a Jew, who is described as having vulture like features and as suffering from “one of those intermittent phases of blind fatalism to which the Semitic races are peculiarly subject.”

One special touch in reading this book, was the volume itself. I checked the book out via inter-library loan from the Texas Tech University library. It had been printed in 1909, its binding worn, its pages yellowed and powdery, the illustrations fading. There was an old date stamp log glued to the inside cover, and I could see the dates where it been checked out -– 1924, 1945… It added to the gothic intrigue, the feelings of continuity, history and eternity.

Overall, the journey to Prague was time well spent.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 1st, 2007 at 7:16 pm and is filed under Continental Europe, competetive reading. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.