Anna Edes: Novel

A skillful portrayal of the cruelty and emptiness of bourgeois life, Anna Édes was first published in 1926 and enthusiastically received by the intellectual coffee-house society through which it circulated. The novel was later acknowledged by authors such as Thomas Mann as a model of language and form, and in turn established Dezso Kosztolanyi as one of the most significant writers of Eastern European fiction. Anna is the hard-working and long-suffering heroine, the unhappy maid destroyed by her pitiless employers. Her tragic relationship with them is played out against the political turbulence in Budapest following the First World War. Yet her endurance and revenge are depicted with keen psychological as well as historical insight, becoming, in the words of the translator, "not merely an argument about social conditions but raised to genuine tragedy."

Author: Dezso Kosztolányi
Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
Published: 11/17/1993
Pages: 240
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.58lbs
Size: 8.01h x 5.38w x 0.68d
ISBN: 9780811212557

Review Citation(s):
Library Journal 11/01/1993
Library Journal 01/01/1994
Publishers Weekly 10/18/1993

About the Author
Szirtes, George: - George Szirtes (b. 1948) is an award-winning poet and translator who settled in England after his family fled the Hungarian Uprising of 1956. His translation of Satantango by László Krasznahorkai won the 2013 Best Translated Book Award.Kosztolányi, Dezso: - Dezso Kosztolányi was born in 1885 and gained notoriety as a journalist in Budapest during the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. An integral member of the intellectual and literary circles of the period, he published his first collection of poems, Within Four Walls, to great acclaim in 1907. His writings have influenced generations of Hungarian writers ever since.