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Title: A Feast in the Garden by George Konrad, Imre Goldstein ISBN: 0-15-130548-X Publisher: Harcourt Pub. Date: 01 May, 1992 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $23.95

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Average Customer Rating: 3.5 (2 reviews)

Rating: 2
Summary: Case study: hazards of the "fictionalized" autobiography
Comment: The Publisher's Weekly blurb provided by amazon.com hits the target. Why Konrad bothers to invent "David Kobra" to provide the author's seemingly randomly connected reflections when it's evident that they are Konrad's own life, more or less, strains the limits of what we expect from a previously capable writer. Wartime descriptions and subsequent reports from Hungarian recent history as witnessed first-hand enliven parts of this novel, but too much attention to extraneous affairs of the heart and the head drag down any momentum gained by this novel's livelier moments. This work sorely needed a tough editor.

I would have accepted either an tighter autobiography or an energized novel, but not this rambling narrative, lazily assembled and languidly paced with little regard for sustaining any reader's interest but the author's own for his story. Disappointing, given the inherent interest of much of the material of a life spanning the past half-century and more in Hungary.

An English-language reader curious about this period would better find "The Undefeated" by Palocsi or "My Happy Days in Hell" by Faludy as first-person testimonies of life lived under such turmoil as Stalinism, or novels like Konrad's earlier "The Loser" for communism, Fischer's "Under the Frog" for the 1956 revolution or "Fateless" by Kertesz for the Nazi camps suitable for more gripping stories.

Rating: 5
Summary: More wonderful fiction from eastern Europe
Comment: There is something about the fiction of Eastern Europe that is both marvelous and undefinable. Milan Kundara's Unbearable Lightness of Being, Kadare's Three-Arched Bridge (above) do so much more than tell a story and draw characters. They define places and moods with great style and subtlety. Hungarian novelist George Konrad's A Feast in the Garden falls into this marvelous class of books. The "story" Konrad tells is not linear, and might not be considered even a story at all, the way it switches from place to place, time to time, and character to character. It is a serious work, dealing both with the pogrom of the Jews under the Nazis and Soviet oppression during the 50's and 60's, but the author's tone is not one of unremitting grief.

Like the Kundara novel, I believe this book might best be read on a series of summer afternoons, at a European sidewalk cafe, as people pass and friends drop by. The cafe is important to Konrad's world.

One brief description, by the intellectual womanizer Janos while visiting Jerusalem, is worth quoting in full: "There he was, a city loafer, sitting in an Arab cafe in Jerusalem because he could not find a decent Eastern European Jewish cafe. How can one wait for the Messiah without a decent cafe? Where do you think the Messiah would go first, where would he start his preaching? In such a cafe, obviously." Many more such delights await the reader of this fine book.