The End of a Family Story

By Péter Nádas and Anna Valentová

Book Overview

The narrator of The End of a Family Story is a young boy who lives alone with his grandparents. His rebellious, talkative grandfather escapes the present by fleeing to his memories of the past, weaving for his grandson a fantastic tapestry of stories both of family sagas and of biblical, Talmudic, and historical characters. Simultaneously, the storyteller and the boy realize that the boy's father, a government official, has betrayed the family and is now being named a traitor by the authorities. Liberated into sincerity and freedom by his grandfather's stories, the boy gives dark and passionate testimony to the horrors of the adult world.Inviting comparisons with the work of Isaac Babel, Salman Rushdie, and Italo Calvino, The End of a Family Story further confirms Nadas as one of contemporary Europe's preeminent novelists.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0140291792
• ISBN13: 9780140291797
• Release Date: January 2000
• Publisher: Penguin Group
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 0.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.0" x 7.7"

Customer Reviews

Childhood's innocence

To begin, there are a few reasons I enjoyed this story of a childhood in a different part of the world: one, the interplay of childhood imagination with reality and second, the genealogical history of the family's heritage through beautiful stories told by the grandfather and by the child's witness to contemporary events. Personally speaking, reading this beautiful story was an hypnotic experience. The interplay of close-up, magnified images through the young boy's encounters and observations with nature, family members, and related events as they involved his family, then himself and others add up to a sensitively written story set in tumultuous times, which are known only through the child's connection with them. Basically, the child-narrator's viewpoint prevails, allowing for a gentle ending. His early, childish imaginings in response to his new predicaments gain greater clarity (as they do also for this reader) as these situations grow both more familiar and, hence, more sharp. The crystally clear narrative seems to grow ever more icily transparent as his consciousness of them grows. Differently from other novels that may feature several narrators on the track of a plausibly accurate explanation for a simple event shrouded in mystery, for example Iain Pears' INSTANCE OF THE FINGERPOST, THE END OF A FAMILY STORY is a solo piece that mostly moves ever forward in time along with the boy. Family stories told by the grandfather about the far past or impinging contemporary events only broaden the child's connectedness to his present situation. THE END OF A FAMILY STORY leaves with a sense of release and playfulness. The balance however dubious at times seems to be safeguarded by the child's innocence. There is something good and hopeful in that state, and the denouement falls into line with it. In summary, these merits in the narrative as well as the non-encounters, which the child does not know but which add subtle drama to this story of childhood, recommends itself to further exploration of Nadas' literature.