A Book of Memories
Description
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.
Product Details
Price
$28.00
$26.04
Publisher
Picador USA
Publish Date
July 01, 2008
Pages
720
Dimensions
5.5 X 8.4 X 1.7 inches | 1.85 pounds
Language
English
Type
Paperback
EAN/UPC
9780312427962
Earn by promoting books
Earn money by sharing your favorite books through our Affiliate program.
Become an affiliateAbout the Author
Péter Nádas is the author of the novels A Book of Memories, The End of a Family Story, and Love. He lives in Gombosszeg, in western Hungary.
Reviews
"The greatest novel written in our time, and one of the great books of the century." --Susan Sontag
"A vast, astonishing, reverberant novel . . . It is a comprehensive and all-comprehending book about politics, sex, art, history, psychology, mortality, and memory." --Richard Dyer, The Boston Globe "A huge philosophically complex, sensuously textured novel." --Eva Hoffman, The New York Times Book Review "A magnum opus . . . [Nádas] articulates erotic experience with surpassing precision and grace. . . . There is great beauty to the writing." --Susan Miron, The Wall Street Journal "There is a wealth of accomplishment in A Book of Memories. It is an epic and immensely fertile exploration of contemporary history and sensibility." --Richard Eder, Los Angeles Times "A superb achievement, by a world-class writer." --Susan Ruben Suleiman, The Village Voice "A Book of Memories will endure as a great moral expression of the European crucible of public and private souls, genuinely worthy of Proust, Henry James, Musil, and Mann as an authoritative testimony to the intellectual and emotional lives of an epoch." --The Seattle Times