She Loves Me [Hardcover]

Peter Esterhazy (Author), Judith Sollosy (Translator)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

How does world-renowned Hungarian novelist Peter Esterhazy encounter love? In She Loves Me, you can count the ways. Although each of the 97 vignette-style chapters begins with "There's this woman," the playful waters of these narratives run deeper than the mere variations of love. Under the surface are the politics of obsessions, the body, power struggles, and the fragmented viewpoints of self that most individuals either try to piece together or try to pretend are intact and whole. The fragments praise ("I'm as important to her as new potatoes with parsley."), they promise ("She loves me. She just doesn't know it yet."), and they prod ("...she talked me into becoming what she called 'vegetarians'... because she was thinking how much better off we'd be without the pitiful wailing and whining of our bodies"). Sometimes the fragments look suspiciously familiar ("She ... uh ... loves me. My mother's memory lives on mainly as an adjunct of her goulash"), but each is a contemporary delight.

From Library Journal

There's this narrator. He loves and/or hates women who love and/or hate him. And this narrator loves to describe these women, to recount their strengths and weaknesses, to paint the glory of their bodies, to explore the nature of their volatile relationship with him. Hungarian novelist Esterhazy chronicles one romance after another in the course of 97 short chapters that entertain and tantalize, drawing on his skill as a master wordsmith to depict the varieties of male-female connection through vivid, graphic description and humorous reflection. Although some of his earlier works (e.g., The Book of Hrabal, LJ 10/1/94) may have challenged readers with labyrinthine language, the present work is delightfully accessible, commendably translated, and graced with an earthy humor that should win the author a greater following among English-language readers. Essential for academic libraries as well as larger public libraries.?Sister M. Anna Falbo, Villa Maria Coll. Lib., Buffalo, N.Y.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 196 pages
• Publisher: Northwestern University Press; Translated edition (December 24, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0810115573
• ISBN-13: 978-0810115576
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.3 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,630,342 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Van egy konyv..., July 20, 2000

By 

Mike Rust - See all my reviews

This review is from: She Loves Me (Hardcover)

This book is really superb, and makes an excellent case for how tragically overlooked Hungarian literature is. Think of it as a Hungarian answer to Jeanette Winterson's Written on the Body. In that book, the identity and gender of the narrator fade into insignificance so that the focus can be entirely on love itself. Here, the narrator reminds fixed, but the beloved remains something of an amorphous blur, ambiguously slipping through different people in a non-linear chronology throughout 20th century Hungarian history. Esterhazy brilliantly uses sex and love as a metaphor for Hungarian politics and national identity (hardly a new trick for him) and vice versa. Thus, the book is not only an exquisite encyclopedia of love but an implicit meditation on Hungarian history. I first read this book sitting by the Danube with a bottle of bikave'r, but you don't have to be conversant at all in Hungarian history to get a ton out of this book. And it just might make you interested in Hungary as a side-effect.