Here where the literary culture is held hostage, the art of narration flourishes by mouth. In Prague, stories aren’t simply stories; it’s what they have instead of life.

Roth contrasts an officially constrained “literary culture” with the resilience of oral storytelling. The line suggests that when institutions police publication and public discourse, narrative energy migrates into speech—private talk, anecdote, rumor, and the intimate circulation of stories. “Held hostage” implies censorship and surveillance; “flourishes by mouth” implies an adaptive counterculture. The final claim—stories as what people have “instead of life”—pushes beyond mere artistic observation to existential substitution: in a city where ordinary self-determination is curtailed, narration becomes a surrogate for lived possibility, a way to reclaim agency, identity, and freedom through imagination and shared memory.