Following a crippling depression and institutionalization, the writer Desmond wanders from his native Dublin around an increasingly unrecognizable Europe, and as far as the southern United States, assembling a patchwork of small stories, conversations, love affairs, memories, regrets, and confrontations: the labyrinth of stories of people whose lives you touch . . . so that your mind becomes like a polychromatic Irish pub. Whether a series of tragic postcards, a cubist novel, or a memoir shorn of its connective tissue,A Farewell to Praguestands as Desmond Hogans greatest achievement: a catalog of the moments that justify a lifeor shine a light on its emptiness.