A Book Of Memories

Description

Acclaimed Hungarian novelist Peter Nadas weaves together three voices to blow the history of his country wide open. A Book of Memories is made up of three first-person narratives- The first, that of a young Hungarian writer and his fated love for a German poet; we also learn of the narrator's adolescence in Budapest, when he experiences the downfall of his once upper-class but now pro-Communist family. A second memoir, alternating with the first, is a novel the narrator is composing about a refined Belle Epoque aesthete, whose anti-bourgeois transgressions seem like emotionally overcharged versions of the narrator's own experiences. A third voice is that of a childhood friend who, after the narrator's return to his homeland, offers an apparently more objective account of their friendship. Together these brilliantly coloured lives are integrated into a powerful work of tragic intensity.

Peter Nadas was born in Budapest in 1942. Among his works translated into English are the novels A Book of Memories, The End of a Family Story, Love and Parallel Stories; a collection of stories and essays, Fire and Knowledge and two pieces of short fiction, A Lovely Tale of Photography and Peter Nadas- Own Death. He lives with his wife in Gombosszeg, Hungary.

Original and exhilarating work that demands to be read again * Sunday Times * The greatest novel written in our time, one of the great books of the century -- Susan Sontag One of the most important novels of our time * Times Literary Supplement * The monumental event of recent Hungarian history, the fated uprising of 1956, is accounted for in the most affecting manner imaginable in these haunted pages * Daily Telegraph * What makes this Book of Memories so memorable is the sheer quality of the prose, its subtlety and intelligence, which shines through what seems an elegant and unobtrusively American translation * The Times *