Not Art

Fülszöveg

More than two decades have passed since Péter Esterházy ended his book Jielping Verbs of the J feart with the sentence "I will write about all that in more detail later." In this luminous növel, he finally makes clear the meaning of this literary mystery.
cLA(ot ciArt is the story of a mother whose defining communication with the world is in the language of football, a vocabulary that eclipses not only her son but everything else. Football, which in the author's penultimate book, Journey to the -Depths ofthe %ighteen~Tard jQine (2006), is a stage and a médium for priváté historiography, now acts as a filter through which the world is seen, and is the root of his relationship to his mother and his mother tongue: a mother's language complex.
Readers will discover "family stories," subtly written and rounded, fiiled with irony, beauty, history, the Magnificent Magyars, father, grandmother, aunt, uncle, mother, life, and death. There is emotion—platonic love, marital love, and a... Tovább

Fülszöveg

More than two decades have passed since Péter Esterházy ended his book Jielping Verbs of the J feart with the sentence "I will write about all that in more detail later." In this luminous növel, he finally makes clear the meaning of this literary mystery.
cLA(ot ciArt is the story of a mother whose defining communication with the world is in the language of football, a vocabulary that eclipses not only her son but everything else. Football, which in the author's penultimate book, Journey to the -Depths ofthe %ighteen~Tard jQine (2006), is a stage and a médium for priváté historiography, now acts as a filter through which the world is seen, and is the root of his relationship to his mother and his mother tongue: a mother's language complex.
Readers will discover "family stories," subtly written and rounded, fiiled with irony, beauty, history, the Magnificent Magyars, father, grandmother, aunt, uncle, mother, life, and death. There is emotion—platonic love, marital love, and a son's love for his parents. And there is the Esterházyesque auto-reflexive textual world (where does the author begin and end?). Old-world glamour meets fractured postwar reality in a tale that touches on many aspects of life and philosophy relevant to us today—while centering on a son's relationship to his mother and the game of football that they love.
PÉTER ESTERHÁZY, a member of one of Europe's most prominent aristo-cratic families, was born in Budapest in 1950. His books, published chiefly in Europe, are widely considered significant contributions to postwar literature.
JUDITH SOLLOSY is senior editor of the English department of Corvina Books, Budapest, and is a university lecturer on translation. Vissza