A Book Of Memories (Paperback, New edition)

Originally published in 1986 and immediately hailed as a masterpiece, this controversial Hungarian novel requires enormous effort and commitment from its readers. If you're able to meet it halfway, though, it's highly rewarding. Part dreamlike confessional, part political analysis, part psycho-sexual odyssey, its scope is wide-ranging and its storyline almost impossibly complex. Its author compares his approach with that of Plutarch in Parallel Lives; it also recalls Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet with its parallel narratives and multiplying viewpoints. Add Proust, Tolstoy and Thomas Mann and you may catch something of the flavour and aspirations of this massive book. (Kirkus UK)

This extraordinary magnum opus seems at first to be a confessional autobiographical novel in the grand manner, claiming and extending the lagacy of Proust and Mann. 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, alternatingwith 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 oftheir friendship. Together these brilliantly coloured lives are inte- grated in a powerful work of tragic intensity.

General

Imprint:	Vintage
Country of origin:	United Kingdom
Release date:	June 1998
Authors:	Peter Nadas
Dimensions:	198 x 129 x 37mm (L x W x T)
Format:	Paperback - B-format
Pages:	720
Edition:	New edition
ISBN-13:	978-0-09-976631-5
Categories:	Books > Fiction > General & literary fiction > Modern fiction Books > Language & Literature > Literature: texts > Essays, journals, letters & other prose works > General Promotions
LSN:	0-09-976631-0
Barcode:	9780099766315

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