The Queen's Necklace - Softcover

Antal Szerb; Len Rix (Translator)

3.94

320 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1906548080 ISBN 13: 9781906548087

Publisher: Pushkin Press, 2009

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This book revisits the story of Marie Antoinette s necklace in order to present a portrait of the age. In August 1785 Paris buzzed with a scandal that had everything an eminent churchman, a female fraudster, a part-time prostitute and the hated Queen herself. Its centrepiece was the most expensive diamond necklace ever assembled, and the tangle of fraud, folly, blindness and self-delusion it provoked. The humiliation the affair brought on the royal family contributed to their appalling deaths in the Revolution just four years later. In this unusual, witty and often surprising version of the story, the great Hungarian novelist Antal Szerb takes the narrative as a standpoint from which to survey the entire age including aspects of it seldom considered by more orthodox historians. The author s vast knowledge is worn very lightly and the book teems with amusing anecdotes, but it is at heart a deeply personal work, a remarkable gesture of defiance against the brutal world in which it was written.

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Review:

A writer of immense subtlety and generosity, with an uncommonly light touch which masks its own artistry ... Antal Szerb is one of the great European writers --Ali Smith

Szerb belongs with the master novelists of the 20th century. --Paul Bailey Daily Telegraph

'Szerb is a master novelist whose powers transcend time and language' NICHOLAS LEZARD --The Guardian

About the Author:

Antal Szerb was born in 1901 into a cultivated Budapest family of Jewish descent. Graduating in Hungarian, German and English, he rapidly established himself as an outstanding scholar, publishing books on drama and poetry, studies of Ibsen and Blake, and histories of English, Hungarian, and World Literature. His first novel, the satirical-philosophical The Pendragon Legend, 1934, was set in London and Wales. His acknowledged masterpiece, Journey by Moonlight, appeared in 1937. The Queen's Necklace was composed, together with a third novel, Oliver VII, amidst the wreckage of war: both were instantly banned. In 1945 Szerb died in a forced-labour camp in Western Hungary. A collection of stories and novellas (Love in a Bottle), and three volumes of his literary-critical essays, were published posthumously.

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