An Exclusive Love - Hardcover

Adorjan, Johanna

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393080013 ISBN 13: 9780393080018

Verlag: W W Norton & Co Inc, 2011

Inhaltsangabe

Book by Adorjn Johanna

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Reseña del editor

Two people have grown old together. He is terminally ill, she doesn't want to live without him. One Sunday in autumn, they clean the apartment, leave the dog with a friend, and protect the rose-bushes against the cold of the coming winter. Then they are ready.Tactfully and affectionately, Johanna Adorján has reconstructed the day of her grandparents' suicide. Vera and István were anything but ordinary. Chain-smoking and glamorous, they exuded the aura of a more elegant age. And they had a past which they did not discuss—even within the family. Decades ago they had fled disaster, started a new life in Denmark and—so it seemed—never looked back.Sixteen years after her grandparents' death, Johanna Adorján sets out to fill the gaps of their story, in the process discovering unexpected things about herself and her family. Against the backdrop of the horrors of the 20th-century, she brings Vera and István back to life—a fascinating couple, peculiarly stylish, stubborn, eccentric. With an extraordinary blend of true reporting and novelistic recreation Johanna Adorján tries to understand their last and powerful act.Beautifully written, tender but never sentimental, An Exclusive Love is a brilliantly-constructed memoir and a gorgeous romance, a tale of two people who died as they lived: inseparable.

Contraportada

Praise for An Exclusive Love:“A powerful and affecting memoir—reminiscent of W. G. Sebald—in which the real and the invented blend so seamlessly, and for such a purpose, that one is lost in the spell completely. Adorján’s brave investigations of her grandparents, who survived both the Holocaust and the Soviet invasion of Hungary, illustrate both the resilience of the human spirit and its opposite, the way the injuries of the past will continue to echo for generations to come.”—Philipp Meyer, author of American Rust“I was very much moved by An Exclusive Love—such clarity of thought and feeling. What I think of Anthea Bell as a translator is little short of reverence: one trusts her absolutely, so I know for sure that Johanna Adorján writes with beautiful precision and suppleness. It’s a truly memorable book.”—Diana Athill, author of Somewhere Towards the End“What we have here is a sophisticated intelligence, coupled with the sensibility of an artist, creating a narrator who tells a familiar tale, as though for the first time. This book is, indeed, the memoir as literature.”—Vivian Gornick, author of Fierce Attachments and The Solitude of Self“When there is a suicide, two questions seem inevitable: how, and why? An Exclusive Love answers the latter through speculation, as it must. But this story of the author’s grandparents, whose lives were full of great sorrow but also rich with joy and old-world elegance, reads as absolute truth. An Exclusive Love is an unusually powerful book, beautifully written and translated. Neither sentimental nor judgmental, it offers a prism through which one might examine and perhaps come to understand a most complicated act.”—Elizabeth Berg, author of The Last Time I Saw You

Über diese Auflage

• Verlag: W W Norton & Co Inc
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0393080013
• ISBN 13: 9780393080018
• Einband: Tapa dura
• Anzahl der Seiten: 185