The End Of A Family Story - Softcover

Nádas, Peter

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0099288257 ISBN 13: 9780099288251

Publisher: Vintage, 2000

Synopsis

Paperback. Pub Date: 2000. Pages: 224 in Publisher: Vintage the Set in Hungary in the 1950s when Stalinist repression also was found in the CTX and MGE with has reduced the populace to silence and deception of this book tells the story of an old man who flees to his memories of the past. For his grandson. he invents a fantastic tapestry of stories. a family saga. and a world of myths and legends.

About this title

Review:

In A Book of Memories, Péter Nádas explored Stalinism and post-Communist Eastern Europe through the eyes of a novelist. The Hungarian author's first novel, The End of a Family Story, also features a storyteller at its heart, but this time it is a young boy's rebellious, irreverent grandfather. "Grandpa used to tell me lots of stories. But not fairy tales, real stories," the unnamed narrator recalls. The grandfather tells about his years in the army during World War II, about his youth ("Shall I tell you the story of the suit?"), and often he draws on the Bible for material, mixing psalms and scripture into tales of fairies and fishermen. Fractured Hungarian history, bizarre genealogies--his stories are marvelous but disturbing.

But these yarns are by no means the only stories at work in Nádas's novel. At its center is the narrator's relationship with his elusive, undemonstrative father, a Stalinist functionary who betrays friends and family, only to be branded a traitor by those he worked for in the end. What makes The End of a Family History so powerful is Nádas's use of the child narrator as a filter for the adult experience of Communist Hungary. People die, people are arrested, people disappear--events that adults may rationalize but that children find simply incomprehensible. Written in chapter-long paragraphs and brimming with fantastical imagery (octopuses that swim through the air; a fish in a bathtub; a secret garden) Nádas's novel is heavily symbolic, psychologically acute, and infinitely compelling. --Margaret Prior

About the Author:

Pter Ndas was born in Budapest in 1942. This novel, written before his celebrated A Book of Memories, has been translated into twelve languages. He lives in the village of Gombosszeg, Hungary, and is working on another novel.

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0099288257
• ISBN 13: 9780099288251
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 256