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Bezig met laden... De stedebouwerdoor George Konrad
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An architect in an unnamed city considers his life, his work, and the many-layered history of the city he and his family--architects all--have contributed to building. In the days after World War II--during which American bombers destroyed much of what his father built--he becomes a Stalinist planner and realizes that the power of the nobility, the wealthy and the bourgeois has been usurped by technocrats. Vanished by those technocrats into the communist underworld of torture and imprisonment, he is eventually released into a post-Stalinist world and becomes the chief builder in a provincial town.Told with wit and elegance by one of Hungary's greatest novelists, The City Builder is one of the most important and impassioned books about the indignities of living in--and contributing to--a cruelly depersonalized society. Geen bibliotheekbeschrijvingen gevonden. |
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Google Books — Bezig met laden... GenresDewey Decimale Classificatie (DDC)894.51133Literature Literature of other languages Altaic, Finno-Ugric, Uralic and Dravidian languages Fenno-Ugric languages Ugric languages Hungarian Hungarian fiction 1900–2000LC-classificatieWaarderingGemiddelde:
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Essentially, the narrator is reviewing his life, but in a nonchronological manner. The reader learns not only about the death of his wife, but about his childhood, his father, how he met his wife, the nature of his work and how it differs from that of his father who was a pre-communism planner and architect, the nature of socialist planning, wartime, prison, torture, God and religion, and more. The novel is also a meditation on the meaning of life and freedom, history and social revolutions, cities and communities, and fathers and sons. But all of this is enveloped in prose that is hard to decipher, although beautifully written. Here is an example, by far not the most obscure.
For me, this city is a challenge, a parable, an interrogation frozen in space, the messages of my fellow citizens dead and alive, a system of disappearing and regenerating worlds to come, the horizontal delineation of societies replacing one another by sperm, gunfire, senility; a fossilized tug of war, an Eastern European showcase of devastation and reconstruction . . . Because by virtue of my practiced clichés I have become one of its shareholders; though beyond the tenuous links of my existence and surroundings, beyond my father's overdecorated gravestone and the haunting shadow of a cremated woman, beyond my hardened and irremediable blueprints, my myopic utopias, and the procession of figures out of an ever-darkening past, I could well ask: what have I to do with this East-Central European city whose every shame I know so well. p.22
The introduction to my Dalkey Archive edition, by Carlos Fuentes, compares the experience and writing style of Central Europeans to those of writers from Central and South America and contrasts them with writers from the west, and especially those from the US who, to oversimplify, he feels are always seeking happiness. I didn't find his thoughts particularly helpful in understanding Konrád or this book, but I see some parallels between Konrád's writing style and that of Fuentes in Terra Nostra although, of course, they deal with very different subjects.
I felt lost through a lot of this novel but, having finished, I almost feel I should start at the beginning again to more fully appreciate what Konrád was doing. I feel I missed a lot the first time through, but I understood enough to realize what an impressive writer Konrád is and what complicated ideas he was exploring.