Product Description
From the author of A Book of Memories comes a dazzling novel set in 1950s Hungary that celebrates the imagination as an indispensable tool for survival.

The narrator of The End of a Family Story is a young boy who lives alone with his grandparents. His rebellious, talkative grandfather escapes the present by fleeing to his memories of the past, weaving for his grandson a fantastic tapestry of stories both of family sagas and of biblical, Talmudic, and historical characters. Simultaneously, the storyteller and the boy realize that the boy’s father, a government official, has betrayed the family 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 horrors of the adult world.

Inviting comparisons with the work of Isaac Babel, Salman Rushdie, and Italo Calvino, The End of a Family Story further confirms Ndas as one of contemporary Europe’s preeminent novelists.

“Drifts from dream to memory and memory to dream . . . it is probably this very mysteriousness that makes the novel so haunting, and its celebration of the pandemonium of human experience so compelling.”–The Boston Globe

“For fans of Ndas’ exquisite, serpentine language, this is a welcome addition to his oeuvre.” –Time Out New YorkAmazon.com 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 The End of a Family Story

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