A Book of Memories

A Book of Memories

by Péter Nádas (Author)

Synopsis

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.

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More Information

Format: Paperback
Pages: 720
Edition: New e.
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 04 Jun 1998

ISBN 10: 0099766310
ISBN 13: 9780099766315
Book Overview: Acclaimed Hungarian novelist Peter Nadas weaves together three voices to blow the history of his country wide open.

Media Reviews
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 *
Author Bio
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.