Not Art: A Novel

Product Description

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 & a medium for private historiography, now acts as a filter through which the world is seen, & is the root of his relationship to his mother & his mother tongue: a mother`s language complex. Readers will discover `family stories`, subtly written & rounded, filled with irony, beauty, history, the Magnificent Magyars, father, grandmother, aunt, uncle, mother, life & death. There is emotion-platonic love, marital love, & a son`s love for his parents. & there is the Esterhazyesque auto-reflexive textual world (Where does the author begin & end?). Old world glamour meets fractured post-war reality in a tale that touches on many aspects of life & philosophy relevant to us today
- while centering on a son`s relationship to his mother & 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.