A Romantic Education

Rating:
Summary: Elegant and lyrical
Review: I first read Patricia Hampl's I Could Tell You Stories when I took a 1st person essay writing class, and all of us in the class became instant fans. Her book provoked endless discussions about the reliability (or Unreliability) of memory and the role it plays in memoir writing. Hampl's A Romantic Education allows us to continue following her down her chosen path as she returns to Prague in search of her heritage during the gray pall of socialism. This edition of A Romantic Education is a reissue following the Velvet Revolution and is full of richly nuanced detail that we have come to expect from Hampl. It's an elegant piece of writing that allows us to taste and dabble in the trickling stream of history running beneath the surface of the everlasting riddle of personal memory.