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The End of a Family Story: A Novel - Hardcover

 
9780374148324: The End of a Family Story: A Novel
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It is the 1950s, in Hungary, when Stalinist repression has reduced the populace to silence and deception. The narrator, a young boy, lives alone with his grandparents. His rebellious, talkative grandfather, refusing to submit to the implacable realities, flees to his memories of the past, in which he believes he can still find redemption, and for his grandson, he weaves a fantastic tapestry of stories of family sagas. His myths and legends depict the luxuriant history of a family with both Christian and Jewish roots, and of a people who, having denied the Messiah, must legitimate their faith and expiate their sins over thousands of years. And, as he talks, he teaches the boy that, however wild and wondrous the stories may seem, every sentence in them is "a unit of truth."
Simultaneously, another terrible story is engaging both the storyteller and the boy. Together they realize that the boy's father, a government official, has betrayed his family and friends, and is now being named a traitor by the authorities. Liberated into sincerity and freedom by his grandfather's stories, the boy gives dark and passionate testimony to the alienation and treason of a sinister adult world. And finally we see how his family story will end.

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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.

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  • PublisherFarrar Straus & Giroux
  • Publication date1998
  • ISBN 10 0374148325
  • ISBN 13 9780374148324
  • BindingHardcover
  • Edition number1
  • Number of pages245
  • Rating

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