Fire and Knowledge: Fiction and Essays

By Péter Nádas

Book Overview

A superb collection of short stories, essays, and literary criticism from the great Hungarian writer The U.S. publication of A Book of Memories in 1997 introduced to our shores the work of an extraordinary novelist, an artist whom critics easily compared to Robert Musil, James Joyce, and Thomas Mann. Now, in Fire and Knowledge, we discover other aspects of Peter Nadas's major presence in European life and letters: as a trenchant commentator on the events that have transformed his country and all of Europe since 1989, as a stunning literary critic, as a subtle interpreter of language and politics in societies both free and unfree, as a moralist with a discerning eye for the crippling effects of deception and hypocrisy upon us all. In addition, Fire and Knowledge acquaints us more fully with Nadas's evolution as a writer of fiction, for it includes stories dating from the 1960s and 1970s, when he had to write in extremely stringent, even dangerous circumstances, as well as some from more recent years, since the publication of his major novels and the reintegration of Western and Eastern Europe. Here, in full, is a rich and rewarding compilation of works by one of our greatest living writers.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0374299641
• ISBN13: 9780374299644
• Release Date: July 2007
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Length: 400 Pages
• Weight: 1.54 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.4" x 1.3" x 6.2"

Customer Reviews

Astonishing mind, language, and scope.

Nadas' essays on culture change and boundedness are as stimulating as the best in the best-taught seminars of US colleges and universities. (His novels have different virtues and challenges.) The essays bear study and rereading in the ways great plays reward repeat visits. The paradigms, as in Fate and Technique are as rich, persuasive, and powerful as any in Western culture. The essay on some Russian stage productions of Hamlet is deeper, richer, and more vivid than any I read in years of theater study. It is astonishing that translator Imre Goldstein could convey the wit, vocabulary, and range of language usage of the author writing sometimes from a child's viewpoint, and at others as a rival to the great 20th century and current critics of culture and politics. Like great film and stage directors who inspire great production work from collaborating artists, Nadas has attracted the best collaborator and translator here, (as he did, too, in Peter Forgacs screen adaptation of his "Own Death." FSG's printing is top rate.