Kornel Esti
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
A great masterpiece never before available in English, Kornél Esti is the wild final book by a Hungarian genius.
Crazy, funny and gorgeously dark, Kornél Esti sets into rollicking action a series of adventures about a man and his wicked dopplegänger, who breathes every forbidden idea of his childhood into his ear, and then reappears decades later.
Part Gogol, part Chekhov, and all brilliance, Kosztolányi in his final book serves up his most magical, radical, and intoxicating work. Here is a novel which inquires: What if your id (loyally keeping your name) decides to strike out on its own, cuts a disreputable swath through the world, and then sends home to you all its unpaid bills and ruined maidens? And then: What if you and your alter ego decide to write a book together?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A collaboration between an unnamed narrator and his wild prankster of a friend, this collection of vignettes follows the adventures of the sometimes poet Korn l Esti from a Budapest coffee shop to his unlikely interactions with a Bulgarian train guard and other charmers, mostly of the early-20th-century, ink-stained variety. Esti, "a half-baked literary freak," is smart, funny, and exciting, apparently everything the narrator is not "I paid dearly for our friendship," the narrator says. Kosztol nyi (1885 1936) skillfully draws the narrator's admiration and envy of Esti, leaving the reader feeling the same sense of wonder for the ersatz hero that our increasingly invisible storyteller has. One can't help being charmed by the duo, one with "determined eccentricity" and the other with begrudging admiration, and Adams's clean translation, with helpful footnotes, makes this nearly 80-year-old novel feel almost modern and easily entertaining.
