The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Guided Tours of Hell by Francine Prose
Rod Kessler

Francine Prose. Guided Tours of Hell. Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt, 1997. 241 pp. $23.00.

To the list of recent—and classic—books tracing the moral adventures of Americans in Europe we must add the two novellas collected together under the title Guided Tours of Hell. Landau, the protagonist of Francine Prose’s sixty-eight-page title work, is a third-rate American playwright visiting Prague for the First International Kafka Congress (his play for one actress—Letters from Felice—imagines the lost half of Kafka’s famous love correspondence). We follow a claque of frumpy, ego-jostling, middle-aged academics on a tour of the Terrezenstadt Nazi concentration camp where Landau wrestles mightily—against his own jealousies and under a cruelly blazing sun—to construe justly and objectively his flamboyant yet vexing rival, Jiri Krakauer, star writer and academic, who, although deserving of sympathy as a one-time inmate of the very camp, is arguably a fraud.
The second, longer work, “Three Pigs in Five Days,” follows Nina, a thirty-something American travel writer, to Paris and to the Hotel Danton, where her lover, also her boss at Allo! magazine, has apparently banished her. At the hotel, itself little more than a brothel, she lies in bed emotionally paralyzed, watching a television that carries only broadcasts of peasant farm couples slaughtering pigs to make sausages. The story plays itself out amid the Paris monuments to the dead including gloomy catacombs, Marie Antoinette’s execution spot, and Simone de Beauvoir’s grave site.
Putting aside Prose’s Paris and Prague, both brilliantly realized, the author’s true dark landscape here is mentation itself. It’s not just that she identifies uncertainty and ambivalence as one’s lot but that she’s so knowledgeable a tour guide of those terrains. Here is a writer whose eye is sharp, whose prose is smart, whose allusions are both erudite and funky, whose humor is wry. [Rod Kessler]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction Guided Tours of Hell by Francine Prose Rod Kessler Francine Prose. Guided Tours of Hell. Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt, 1997. 241 pp. $23.00. To the list of recent—and classic—books tracing the moral adventures of Americans in Europe we must add the two novellas collected together under the title Guided Tours of Hell. Landau, the protagonist of Francine Prose’s sixty-eight-page title work, is a third-rate American playwright visiting Prague for the First International Kafka Congress (his play for one actress—Letters from Felice—imagines the lost half of Kafka’s famous love correspondence). We follow a claque of frumpy, ego-jostling, middle-aged academics on a tour of the Terrezenstadt Nazi concentration camp where Landau wrestles mightily—against his own jealousies and under a cruelly blazing sun—to construe justly and objectively his flamboyant yet vexing rival, Jiri Krakauer, star writer and academic, who, although deserving of sympathy as a one-time inmate of the very camp, is arguably a fraud. The second, longer work, “Three Pigs in Five Days,” follows Nina, a thirty-something American travel writer, to Paris and to the Hotel Danton, where her lover, also her boss at Allo! magazine, has apparently banished her. At the hotel, itself little more than a brothel, she lies in bed emotionally paralyzed, watching a television that carries only broadcasts of peasant farm couples slaughtering pigs to make sausages. The story plays itself out amid the Paris monuments to the dead including gloomy catacombs, Marie Antoinette’s execution spot, and Simone de Beauvoir’s grave site. Putting aside Prose’s Paris and Prague, both brilliantly realized, the author’s true dark landscape here is mentation itself. It’s not just that she identifies uncertainty and ambivalence as one’s lot but that she’s so knowledgeable a tour guide of those terrains. Here is a writer whose eye is sharp, whose prose is smart, whose allusions are both erudite and funky, whose humor is wry. [Rod Kessler]

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