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Synopsis
Fiction. Translated from the Hungarian by Imre Goldstein. An enquiry into the nature of eroticism, an unflinching exploration of the physical and psychological aspects of love bordering on sexual mysticism, OUT OF ONESELF is a collection of two novellas that expore two different epochs in Hungarian history through the sexual relationships of its characters, who are passionately searching for a way out of their hapless and sinful world. Each story revolves around a seductive, alluring actress, whose erotic attraction is turned into mythic proportion by the aura of the stage or the screen in scenes of such sexual explicitness and obsessiveness in its description that one is reminded of Anais Nin's Delta of Venus. "There is not the slightest doubt that what Andras Palyi has been doing is nothing short of tempting God. It is impossible to read him without a feeling of reverential dread. He blasphemes, he challenges and wages war against God"--Peter Nadas.
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About the Author
Andras Palyi is Hungarian dramatist, editor and critic.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
From BEYOND Sooner or later I’ll lose the sequence of events. This fear is what comes to mind first. Though I am desperately holding on to my memory. Still, everything that happens is nothing but the plain present. It is as if, sunk in the leather easy chair of the rectory, I had opened the newspaper. Small ads at the bottom of the page: SAM. GOLDBERG AND SONS, INC. The country’s oldest textile factory. DANUBE CRUISES. On the First Danubian Steamship Company’s luxury liners. From the Viktorin Walks I am looking at the steamer as it puffs along on the wide Danube. It is spring, the pre-budding ecstasy of nature. My hand in yours. Loveliest Vikt󲩡 Lieber. Only a hundred years ago you would have been a German actress. In the Teatrum of Buda, which not so long ago was a Carmelite monastery, you would have stood on the stage in the midst of a standing ovation. Red velvet all around. On the Viktorin Walk the ground is also red. Or rather brownish red, like moldering rocks. RESPECTFUL THRONG ACCOMPANIES ‘MIN HAVAS ON HIS LAST JOURNEY. The priest, a suicide, who is now being laid to rest with full clerical ceremony. The Provost himself is officiating. With great, rounded, bulging eyes that make him look both childlike and a bit idiotic. There are only two lines on his face, running deep from the nostrils downward. I wouldn’t call them wrinkles; his face is too puffy for that. Under his surplice his paunch protrudes like the belly of an expectant woman. Or like that of a large fat baby. His gestures unmistakably evince that he seeks pleasure at places other than in the embrace of women. But me, he quickly declares mentally ill so he wouldn’t have to deprive me of my last rites. For he who offends even one among them . . . What I’ve done is considered mocking the Scriptures. I wait until old, lame Kolos stops ringing the bell and then lazily shuffles back to the vestry; and then I make my way up the wooden steps into the belfry, and throw myself over the railing. Dashing my head on the flagstones. But the soul lives on and, if it feels like it, may mock and ridicule what is most sacred. The Provost does everything he can not to let mockery make itself heard. Unctuously he recites the text of the ceremony, which I know so well. I bet he wouldn’t be so generous if that suspected communist, Stefi Ká¬á®¬ had done what I did when, without prior notice, he was fired from his job as an engineer in the Manfréż Weiss factory.
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- PublisherTwisted Spoon Press
- Publication date2005
- ISBN 10 8086264211
- ISBN 13 9788086264219
- BindingPaperback
- LanguageEnglish
- Number of pages140
- Rating
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Out of Oneself: Two Novellas
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Condition: Fine. Tato kniha byla vydana ceskym nakladatelstvim Twisted Spoon Press, ktere sidli v Praze a vydava dila ceskych a slovanskych autoru v anglickem jazyce.Oficialni anotace nakladatele: An enquiry into the nature or eroticism, an unflinching exploration of the physical and psychological aspects of love bordering on sexual mysticism, Out of Oneself is a collection of two novellas that explore two different epochs in Hungarian history through the sexual relationships of its characters. One, an agonizing love triangle between an extraordinarily beautiful stage actress, a young Catholic priest, and a Jewish engineer in the 1930s, the other, the ecstatic union of an auto mechanic-cum-screenwriter and a young movie actress who promises redemption through pure sensuality in Budapest of the 1980s, these form the central constellations for the author's exploration of carnality's relationship to spirituality. Though chronologically separated by half a century, one story resonates with the other through what Palyi calls the "language of the body."Palyi's characters are passionately searching for a way out of their hapless and sinful world. Each story revolves around a seductive, alluring actress, whose erotic attraction is turned into mythic proportion by the aura of the stage or the screen in scenes of obsessive sexual explicitness. But beyond the focus on carnal relationships, Palyi's writing give us a vivid portrayal of their times: the swan song of the Hungarian "Christian regime" on the eve of World War II, with the specter of the Holocaust looming menacingly, and the disintegration of "goulash Communism" just prior to the changes of the late 1980s. According to Peter Nadas, Palyi "is among those few who see clearly the chaos of the realignment of Hungarian society, a process that has been going on for fifty years ."The historical milieu, however, is secondary. Like with most of Palyi's work, his meditation on carnal pleasure places sensuality as the substitute for a transcendence that is absent. The thirst for redemption and transubstantiation exhibited by his characters is quenched only by sex and death.The current volume introduces to the English-speaking world the "otherness" of a writer ? considered to be one of Hungary's leading, though he has managed to avoid becoming fashionable ? capable of creating extraordinary atmospheres. Seller Inventory # 22e5e759-5112-4ba6-a08d-721fff862104
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