Kornel Esti
Deszö Kosztolányi author Bernard Adams translator
Format:Paperback
Publisher:New Directions Publishing Corporation
Published:18th Mar '11
Should be back in stock very soon
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?
"Each of these stories displays a mastery of texture, nuance, and pacing that is absolutely first rate." -- Christopher Byrd - The Daily Beast
"Kosztolányi was a ringleader in the 20th-century flowering of Hungarian literature, a poet who reformed the language, and a fiction writer of world class." -- The Guardian
"One of the most important and glittering writers of a Hungarian golden age, Kosztolányi is multicolored and ineffable, like a rainbow. At the end of his life, the virtuoso Kornél Esti appears." -- Peter Esterházy
"If anyone ever truly wanted to write the history of the Hungarian people, the author would certainly take that Dantean first sentence of Kosztolányi’s Kornél Esti as the work’s epigraph: in a word, the most wondrous first sentence ever written in the Hungarian language." -- László Krasznahorkai
"A tender comedy tinged with the absurdity of life, the thrill of sociability, and the imminence of death, which I guess is exactly the kind of book I like." -- Chad Harbach
- Commended for Best Translated Book Award (Fiction) 2012
ISBN: 9780811218436
Dimensions: 206mm x 132mm x 18mm
Weight: 270g
240 pages