Péter Esterházy - Böcker

A biographical novel in the grand European literary tradition that spans multiple generations and three centuries of tumultuous Central European history, as witnessed by the Esterhazys, a leading Hungarian family.The Esterhazys, one of Europe's most prominent aristocratic families, are indelibly inscribed in the history of the Hapsburg Empire. Having gone through epic conquest, tragedy, triumph and near destruction, the Esterhazy family lore is rich, poignant, entertaining and awe-inspiring. ‘Celestial Harmonies’ is a national epic in the form of fiction, which Esterhazy writes by reinventing the traditional form of the dynastic saga.Beginning with short sections narrated in the first person, ‘Celestial Harmonies’ recounts legends, inventions and episodes that form a mosaic in which chronology is abandoned and only one prominent figure exists: 'My Father'. The character of 'My Father' is a Don Juan, a profligate, a tycoon and a scholar, a bishop, an architect, a madman and a tyrant, an envoy and a premier, a student of Helmholtz and the cat in Schrodinger's experiment. He stands for each and every family member, functioning as a mount for simply everything, a man as unlimited and inexhaustible as the power born by the book's fictional family.‘Celestial Harmonies’ is a rich, dazzlingly original exploration of the emotional ties that bind men to their fathers, bonds that stand outside time, place and history. Old world glamour meets harsh post-war reality in a novel that touches on all aspects of life and philosophy relevant to us today – the nature of dictatorship, love, hate and family relationships, to meditations on betrayal, God and Christianity.

More than two decades have passed since Peter Esterhazy ended his book "Helping Verbs of the Heart" with the sentence, 'I will write about all that in more detail later'. In this luminous novel, he finally makes the meaning of this literary mystery clear. "Not Art" is the story of a mother whose defining communication with the world is in the language of football, a vocabulary that eclipses not only her son, but everything else. Football, in the author's next to the last book a stage and a medium for private historiography, now acts as a filter through which the world is seen, and is the root of his relationship to his mother and his mother tongue: a mother's language complex. Readers will discover 'family stories', subtly written and rounded, filled with irony, beauty, history, the Magnificent Magyars, father, grandmother, aunt, uncle, mother, life and death. There is emotion-platonic love, marital love, and a son's love for his parents. And there is the Esterhazyesque auto-reflexive textual world (Where does the author begin and end?).Old world glamour meets fractured post-war reality in a tale that touches on many aspects of life and philosophy relevant to us today - while centering on a son's relationship to his mother and the game of football that they love. The author received the following international awards: Vilenica Prize, Slovenia (1988, 1998) Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, France (1992, 1994, 2003) Prize of the Literary Festival in Rome, Italy (1993) Bjornson Prize, Norway (1995) Austrian State Prize, Austria (1999) Herder Prize, Austria (2002) Peace Prize of the German Book Trade at Frankfurt Book Fair (2004). He has also received nearly 20 awards in his native country.