Synopsis
In this picaresque book-length prose poem by a leading Hungarian poet, the Danube becomes the focal point as both a locale and a metaphor.
| Details | | Publication Date: | 1999-11-01 |
| Size | | Height: | 8.5 in | | Width: | 5.8 in | | Thickness: | 0.8 in | | Weight: | 12.0 oz |
Publisher's Note
In The Glance of Countess Hahn-Hahn (down the Danube), Peter Esterhazy blends magic realism and travel narrative to dazzling effect. Esterhazy's hero is a professional Traveller, commissioned -- like Marco Polo by Kubla Khan -- to undertake a voyage of discovery and to prepare a travelogue about the Danube. Communicating his experiences through terse -- and at times surreal -- telegrams to his employer, the Traveller weaves a rich tapestry of narratives, evoking the dreamlike past and the precarious present of a disappearing world. Moving from the Black Forest to the Black Sea, Esterhazy takes the reader on a fascinating European journey of the imagination, down the Danube River, through Vienna, Budapest, and beyond the delta where the mighty river empties into the sea. Filled with allusion, fable, fantasy, history, and autobiography, The Glance of Countess Hahn-Hahn (down the Danube) is Peter Esterhazy at his scintillating, adventurous best.
Industry Reviews
"Esterhazy's trade-mark style, characterized by the overabundance of plays-on-words, puns, and an almost painstakingly high level of ironic reflexivity, makes his work hardly translatable into any foreign language. This is one of the reasons Richard Aczel's remarkably sensitive translation of THE GLANCE OF COUNTESS HAHN-HAHN can be appreciated by any English-speaking reader, and not only those with an interest in Hungarian literature...Richard Aczel's translation succeeds in rendering the idiosyncratic style of the original without resorting to a convoluted English...Persistent readers will be rewarded...as they ill be granted a 'glance' into the multifarious culture and history of Eastern/Central Europe as well as the working of one of the brightest literary minds of the region."
Chicago Review
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