The End of a Family Story [Paperback]

Peter Nadas (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 5, 2000

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 York

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.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 --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Publishers Weekly

As in his previous novel, The Book of Memories, Hungarian author Nadas intricately and beautifully relates concentric stories within stories. In this case, a boy struggles to comprehend the threatening forces wrought by the adults who are supposed to care for him, against the backdrop of Communist politics and, beyond, the larger realm of biblical history. Playing with the neighboring children, the unnamed first-person narrator enacts the "family story" as he knows it, involving himself and two of his friends: he plays Papa, Eva plays Mama and Gabor portrays the child in a makeshift domestic paradise. Nadas quickly shows the irregularities in the real-life model for this idyllic portrait: Papa comes home rarely, traveling at night, stinking of the "barracks where they held those interrogations," his clothes washed hastily overnight in benzene by the boy's principal caretaker, Grandmama. Terrible accusatory arguments between Papa and Grandpapa ensue during these visits; Nadas undercuts the narrative with brusque descriptions of traumatic events that happen later, namely the successive deaths of the boy's grandparents, the exposure of his "traitor" father and the boy's eventual delivery to an institution. Simultaneously, and most lyrically, Grandpapa, obsessed by the sin of his son and the desire to adhere to the truth, recounts to the boy the plight of the biblical Jews, "our ancestors," a story that was related by his own grandfather. Readers of The Book of Memories will find this slim volume knottier and less accessible than the previous work. Moreover, the reader is never apprised of what the father's actual crime is. For those who savor the language, however, unraveling Nadas's tightly skeined prose supplies its own rewards.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics) (June 5, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0140291792
• ISBN-13: 978-0140291797
• Product Dimensions: 7.7 x 5 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,183,517 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Childhood's innocence, July 27, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The End of a Family Story (Hardcover)

To begin, there are a few reasons I enjoyed this story of a childhood in a different part of the world: one, the interplay of childhood imagination with reality and second, the genealogical history of the family's heritage through beautiful stories told by the grandfather and by the child's witness to contemporary events.

Personally speaking, reading this beautiful story was an hypnotic experience. The interplay of close-up, magnified images through the young boy's encounters and observations with nature, family members, and related events as they involved his family, then himself and others add up to a sensitively written story set in tumultuous times, which are known only through the child's connection with them. Basically, the child-narrator's viewpoint prevails, allowing for a gentle ending. His early, childish imaginings in response to his new predicaments gain greater clarity (as they do also for this reader) as these situations grow both more familiar and, hence, more sharp. The crystally clear narrative seems to grow ever more icily transparent as his consciousness of them grows.

Differently from other novels that may feature several narrators on the track of a plausibly accurate explanation for a simple event shrouded in mystery, for example Iain Pears' INSTANCE OF THE FINGERPOST, THE END OF A FAMILY STORY is a solo piece that mostly moves ever forward in time along with the boy. Family stories told by the grandfather about the far past or impinging contemporary events only broaden the child's connectedness to his present situation.

THE END OF A FAMILY STORY leaves with a sense of release and playfulness. The balance however dubious at times seems to be safeguarded by the child's innocence. There is something good and hopeful in that state, and the denouement falls into line with it.

In summary, these merits in the narrative as well as the non-encounters, which the child does not know but which add subtle drama to this story of childhood, recommends itself to further exploration of Nadas' literature.