Nadas, Peter

New York. 1997. Farrar Straus Giroux. 1st American Edition. Very Good in Dustjacket. 0374115435. Translated from the Hungarian by Ivan Sanders With Imre Goldstein. 706 pages. hardcover. Jacket art courtesy of the author. Jacket design by Barbara de Wilde. keywords: Literature Translated Hungary Eastern Europe . FROM THE PUBLISHER - 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. The language is sensuous, erotic, and analytic - radical in its physical intimacy and political candor. A Book of Memories is a radiant, unforgettable accomplishment. inventory #24122 ISBN: 0374115435.