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A biographical novel in the grand European literary tradition that spans multiple generations and three centuries of tumultuous Central European history, as witnessed by the Esterhazys, a leading Hungarian family. The Esterhazys, one of Europe's most prominent aristocratic families, are indelibly inscribed in the history of the Hapsburg Empire. Having gone through epic conquest, tragedy, triumph and near destruction, the Esterhazy family lore is rich, poignant, entertaining and awe-inspiring. 'Celestial Harmonies' is a national epic in the form of fiction, which Esterhazy writes by reinventing the traditional form of the dynastic saga. Beginning with short sections narrated in the first pers...
In The Glance of Countess Hahn-Hahn (down the Danube), Peter Esterhazy blends magic realism and travel narrative to dazzling effect. Esterhazy's hero is a professional Traveller, commissioned -- like Marco Polo by Kubla Khan -- to undertake a voyage of discovery and to prepare a travelogue about the Danube. Communicating his experiences through terse -- and at times surreal -- telegrams to his employer, the Traveller weaves a rich tapestry of narratives, evoking the dreamlike past and the precarious present of a disappearing world. Moving from the Black Forest to the Black Sea, Esterhazy takes the reader on a fascinating European journey of the imagination, down the Danube River, through Vienna, Budapest, and beyond the delta where the mighty river empties into the sea. Filled with allusion, fable, fantasy, history, and autobiography, The Glance of Countess Hahn-Hahn (down the Danube) is Peter Esterhazy at his scintillating, adventurous best.
A surrealistic novel made up of stories and reflections which equate pornography with political tyranny. It is set in Hungary under the Communists. By the author of Book of Hrabal.
An elaborate, elegant homage to the great Czech storyteller Bohumil Hrabal (author of Closely Watched Trains), The Book of Hrabal is also a farewell to the years of communism in Eastern Europe and a glowing paean to the mixed blessings of domestic life.
She Loves Me is Peter Esterhazy's paean to women: beautiful and ugly, kind and nasty, fat and bony, monogamous and promiscuous, seductive, negative, rebellious, and voracious. In ninety-seven short chapters this seductive novel contemplates love and desire and sex and hate, all from the point of view of a manly narrator who considers himself a great and successful lover, a womanizer, a man who may - or may not - be in love with all of the women of the world. Intelligent and funny, this book is a great declaration of love and of contempt, and a philosophical exploration of the many postures and pretenses of eros. With his characteristic verbal pyrotechnics, the serenely jaded Esterhazy proves that there will always be another romance, and that love and hate spring from the same inexhaustible font.
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Kosztolanyi's Skylark is a portrait of provincial life in the Austro-Hungarian monarchy at the turn of the century. Set in the autumn of 1899, it focuses on one extraordinary week in the otherwise uneventful lives of an elderly Hungarian couple and their ugly spinster daughter, Skylark.
A great masterpiece never before available in English, Kornél Esti is the wild final book by a Hungarian genius. Crazy, funny and gorgeously dark, Kornél Esti sets into rollicking action a series of adventures about a man and his wicked dopplegänger, who breathes every forbidden idea of his childhood into his ear, and then reappears decades later. Part Gogol, part Chekhov, and all brilliance, Kosztolányi in his final book serves up his most magical, radical, and intoxicating work. Here is a novel which inquires: What if your id (loyally keeping your name) decides to strike out on its own, cuts a disreputable swath through the world, and then sends home to you all its unpaid bills and ruined maidens? And then: What if you and your alter ego decide to write a book together?
The conquests of an observant Hungarian lover in 97 chapters. He writes, "There is this woman. She feels about me the way I feel about her. She loves me. She hates me. When she hates me, I love her. When she loves me, I hate her. All other eventualities are out of question."
In 1989, the memorable year when the Wall came down, a university student in Berlin on his early morning run finds a corpse lying on a park bench and alerts the authorities. This classic police-procedural scene opens an extraordinary novel, a masterwork that traces the fate of myriad Europeans - Hungarians, Jews, Germans, Gypsies - across the treacherous years of the mid-twentieth century. The social and political circumstances of their lives may vary richly, their sexual and spiritual longings may seem to each of them entirely unique, yet Peter Nádas's magnificent tapestry unveils uncanny, reverberating parallels that link them across time and space. Three unusual men are at the heart of P...