An Exclusive Love
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
'This book tells the story of Vera and Istvan, Hungarian Jews who survived the Holocaust, fled Budapest in 1956 during the uprising, started a new life in Denmark, and committed suicide in Copenghagen in 1991. They were found hand in hand in their bed. They were my grandparents.' Johanna Adorjan
On October 1991, two elegant, proud people who have grown old together decide to take their own lives. He is terminally ill, and she does not want to live without him.
Sixteen years later, their granddaughter Johanna Adorjan reconstructs that day, and pieces together the puzzle of this exotic and mysterious couple. They had a past they did not speak about. Against the background of European history, Adorjan brings Vera and Istvan back to life and learns how their experiences shaped her family and the person she is today.
Beautifully translated by Anthea Bell, An Exclusive Love is both an extraordinary love story and an unsentimental memoir of family life.
'Marvellous…tender and moving…informed by a higher kind of truth…This is a magnificent book. Adorjan is a most accomplished writer, bringing the wit, literary skill and wry compassion of Janet Malcolm to mind. Anthea Bell's translation is gracefully idiomatic.' Sydney Morning Herald
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In a striking debut, Adorj n mingles past, present, memory, and imagination to find meaning in the dual suicide of her charismatic grandparents in October 1991, when the author was 20. Noting the suicides of other concentration-camp survivors like Primo Levi, Arthur Koestler and his wife, and many others, Adorj n asks, "Is it typically Jewish to kill yourself after you have survived the Holocaust so then you determine for yourself how you want to die?" Effectively she re-creates the deaths of a still-glamorous couple; her grandmother, a woman in her early 70s whose enduring beauty recalled film stars such as Elizabeth Taylor, and her cigarillo-loving 82-year-old grandfather. Both survived the Mauthausen extermination camp after being deported from Hungary along with 600,000 other Jews. The author's search for the life experiences that led to such a haunting end takes her to Budapest, Israel, Paris, and Copenhagen and forms a living history of a passionately devoted couple that embodies much of 20th-century European Jewry. The pedantic details of the author's repetitive yet lyrical imaginings of her grandparents' last day are heartbreaking. Ending her book with excerpts from the police report may not have been the most poignant conclusion, but it is the most complete.
