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Goulash: A Novel, by Brian Kimberling
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Review
“Brian Kimberling’s brisk, funny novel [is] set approximately 10 years after Czech independence, when Westernization had turned the country into a confused and unwholesome stew of capitalism and communism . . . The writing is smart, the quips are amusing . . . The story exudes . . . raffish charm.”—Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal“Goulash by Brian Kimberling entertained me so much . . . Kimberling, who lived the expat nightmare, has a droll, quirky take on the scene . . . Goulash made me want another serving.”—Bethanne Patrick, Lit Hub“A quirky, funny, melancholy portrait of a significant European moment, captured by this most subtle of Americans abroad.”—Tessa Hadley, author of The Past and Late in the Day “Goulash is a hilarious novel about a man’s quest for a home in a place full of challenges and lots of beer—Prague, 1998. Wonderful dialogue, endearing characters, and a deep sense of the historical forces at work combine in all the best ways to make this story really delectable.”—Jessica Francis Kane, author of This Close and The Report “A vivid picture of a city creaking and shuddering as it settles into a new dispensation . . . This novel is quick to read, but its compelling pictures and insights will linger in the mind.”—Claire Hopley, The Washington Times“A winning, offbeat yarn about life and love after communism.”—Kirkus Reviews “Kimberling . . . is an exacting wordsmith capable of elegantly simple sentences, and his narrator’s observations are often dryly hilarious . . . A remarkable evocation of time and place.”—Booklist
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About the Author
BRIAN KIMBERLING grew up in southern Indiana and spent several years working in the Czech Republic, Mexico, and Turkey before settling in England. He received an MA in creative writing at Bath Spa University in 2010. Snapper, his first novel, was published in 2013.
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Product details
Hardcover: 224 pages
Publisher: Pantheon (February 26, 2019)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0307908070
ISBN-13: 978-0307908070
Product Dimensions:
5.8 x 0.9 x 8.5 inches
Shipping Weight: 13.9 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review:
4.6 out of 5 stars
3 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
#389,031 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
You are immediately drawn into the book—its places, its characters—and it’s quick witted and fast paced enough that you won’t want to put it down.
I'd not heard of Brian Kimberling before, although GOULASH is his second novel. I'm tempted to call it "antidotal" fiction, but that's mostly because I had just finished reading an ultra-serious novel of the Great War (Sebastian Barry's A LONG LONG WAY) full of sadness and tragic doings - a beautiful book, but filled with mostly unrelenting horror. GOULASH, filled with sly, irreverent humor, provided a perfect counterpoint, or antidote. It had me smiling and chuckling from page one. Essentially it's a rather simple narrative, told in first-person, by 24 year-old Elliot Black, a displaced Hoosier teaching English in Prague at the end of the 1990s. Lonely and underpaid, he meets Britisher Amanda Smith, who does the same kind of work, but has classier, more influential client-students and makes more money. They move in together, are happy for a while and then not so much.Kimberling paints a detailed picture of Prague as it transforms from third-world communism to high-powered capitalism, which is interesting enough, but it is the humor and the dialogue that take center stage in this charming, occasionally moving late-coming-of-age tale. For example, upon meeting, Amanda asks Elliot if Indiana is "a real place." He responds -"Good question. It might be the only real place. It's like the South's middle finger."Or this, on trying to learn Czech -"Czech is a Spiky language orthographically, and it sounds like some intricate artillery being primed. 'Strc prst skrz krk ' is a vowel-less sentence meaning 'stick your finger through your neck' - it is illustrative and onomatopoeic, and, at half speed, exactly what Clint Eastwood's gun says when he is about to deliver a memorable line."See what I mean? And then there was this line about the bathroom in the apartment Elliot and Amanda moved into (and dubbed Graceland) -"The only drawback to the place was a German toilet with a shelf of the lay-and-display kind. You deposited your product on a kind of dry shelf where you could inspect it for clues to your health before flushing."I laughed because I remember those toilets in a German hotel in 1976, and how hilarious my two small sons, 7 and 5, found them. In short, GOULASH is filled with this kind of detail and slightly off-kilter humor.Not ALL of Elliot's story is hilarious, of course, and I did feel a bit bad for him as his personal and work life began to go south, and he had to be bailed out by his mother, back home in Indiana. But a good mix of funny and sad, with plenty of interesting characters mixed in - kinda like goulash, actially. But hey, I enjoyed the hell out of the story in general, and would not hesitate to recommend it to anyone who enjoys a good laugh - and good writing. Well done, Mr Kimberling.
This novel was hilariously great fun to read, but it also stirs something deep into its historical and emotional stew. As someone who spent time in Prague in the early '90s, I was quite struck by this picture of that slightly later time period when Westernizing forces had really run amok in that beautiful city. The protagonist, Elliott Black, a somewhat hapless English teacher from Indiana, is an excellent, astute guide to the chaos of having so much history run straight into the cuisinart of Western capital and EU social forces. Everything seems to be up for grabs, usually with a price tag slapped on to it -- just as Elliott finds that his own shoe has been, in the memorable opening scene of shoes turned into sculpture. Elliott can no more reclaim his swiped shoe than Czechs can their culture, sadly left just lying around everywhere like Kutna Hora's bones for tourists and foreign investors to take and make what they can of. A late scene, of Elliott's being lost somewhere in the toe of an enormous, scrapped Stalin statue with detritus from decades floating around him, captures the feeling in a memorable image, a sort of nightmare womb of historical flotsam. "'It's good to be out of Prague,' Cimarron said. 'Every inch drenched in blood and steeped in alchemy, with a whiff of Soviet body odor.' 'You should write for Lonely Planet,' I said."Just that Loneliest Planet sort of guide himself, Elliott is almost painfully aware that he himself is just a piece of flotsam adrift on forces larger than he can begin to understand. That he tries to understand nonetheless is what makes him such an acute, hilarious observer as well as surprisingly sympathetic. His only anchor against that drift is love, specifically his love for Amanda, a fellow teacher from the UK whose trajectory while in Prague is more definite and upward than Elliott's sideways spin. The clever sparring between the two and their friends and Elliott's adult students provides most of the texture and spark throughout the episodic narrative, but their fights also capture the novel's themes as in this exchange: "She accused me of a morbid obsession with the past, particularly the pasts of people I'd never met and the pasts of people I simply made up, and she felt that this tendency interfered with my ability to spend time meaningfully in the present with her. [...] 'Pasts matter,' I said. 'Pasts matter, because they make us who we are.' 'No, actually,' said Amanda, 'we do that.'" To the reader's benefit, the novel stays firmly if ironically on the side of Elliott's view here, capturing a richly existential melancholy of feeling oneself fighting to define the present moment in its bewilderingly multiple context before it too is inevitably swept away. Elliott's narrative reflects Prague's own, a parallel emphasized late in the narrative when both experience the disorienting crisis of a life-threatening flood in which so much human connection is simply lost.Of course, there's been another flood the entire time, as the novel's cover makes clear, that of the constantly flowing pilsner: "Nothing said over beer really matters," opines the most mysterious of the novel's characters, Mr. Cimarron, artist and fraud and frenemy, but since that covers nearly everything that was said in this novel, this observation more or less unwrites the book. Fortunately, he adds, "Only that something was said," and that saving grace finally is where this simultaneously hilarious and melancholy book leaves us: happy to have been here to witness that things were said, by certain astute and well-meaning people, making fragile connections at a certain time that will never come again. As novels go, this one captures that heady, smart-ass, yet somehow sinking feeling of being young and intelligent and in love and utterly adrift in one's life better than any other I have read.
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