A Book of Memories is made up of three first-person narratives:
The first, that of a young Hungarian writer and his fated love for a German poet; we also learn of the narrator's adolescence in Budapest, when he experiences the downfall of his once upper-class but now pro-Communist family.
A second memoir, alternating with the first, is a novel the narrator is composing about a refined Belle Epoque aesthete, whose anti-bourgeois transgressions seem like emotionally overcharged versions of the narrator's own experiences.
A third voice is that of a childhood friend who, after the narrator's return to his homeland, offers an apparently more objective account of their friendship.
Together these brilliantly coloured lives are integrated into a powerful work of tragic intensity.
- ISBN10 0099766310
- ISBN13 9780099766315
- Publish Date 4 June 1998 (first published 31 December 1997)
- Publish Status Active
- Publish Country GB
- Imprint Vintage
- Format Paperback (B-Format (198x129 mm))
- Pages 720
- Language English