- Bib ID:
- 100696
- Format:
- Book
- Author:
- Nádas, Péter, 1942-
- Uniform Title:
- Emlékiratok könyve. English
- Description:
-
- London : Cape, 1997
- 705 p. ; 24 cm.
- ISBN:
- 022403524X
- Summary:
-
This extraordinary magnum opus seems at first to be a confessional autobiographical novel in the grand manner, claiming and extending the legacy of Proust and Mann. But it is more: Peter Nadas has given us a superb contemporary psychological novel that comes to terms with the ghosts, corpses, and repressed nightmares of Europe's recent past.
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 and of his beloved but repudiated father, a state prosecutor who commits suicide after the 1956 uprising. 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 colored lives are integrated in a powerful work of tragic intensity.
- Subject:
- Europe -- History -- 20th century -- Fiction
- Genre/Form:
- Autobiographical fiction
- Other authors/contributors:
-
- Copyright:
-
In Copyright
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Copyright status was determined using the following information:
- Material type:
- Literary, dramatic or musical work
- Published status:
- Published
- Publication date:
- 1997
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