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May 03, 2009

The Sunday Salon: Far from the magic mountain

Hello fellow Saloners,

I’m here again.

There was an international book festival in Budapest last weekend. Oh, no, no, it was THE book festival of the year. The star guest was Ljudmila Ulickaja, but I haven’t seen any program with her, somehow, I found other events a bit more interesting.

For example a conversation with the Polish author, Pawel Huelle. Is he well known in the UK and the USA? I don’t know, but as I can see, he is quite popular here in Central- Europe. He wrote the book Castorp, which is an adaptation of the novel The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann.
Huelle is a very amusing man, he likes to tell anecdotes, but he can be quite sarcastic too.

This Sunday I started his novel Castorp. It’s about Hans Castorp’s two year in Gdansk (Danzig). My question is for this book, how it connects to The Magic Mountain. What kind of dialog the two works have.
(Gdansk)

After 30 pages, I can see, the book is written in a really classical realistic style, but maybe it would be better nothing to know about Mann’s famous novel, Huelle’s one seems to be quite independent from it. There is only one “thing” seems to be a connection between the two novels, the protagonist, Hans Castorp.

But it’s still a very good book, I think.

Happy reading!

1 megjegyzés:

Deb Nance at Readerbuzz said...

I think I've not read any books set in Hungary except for one very old Newbery winner, from the 1920's or so. We live in a vacuum here in the US....if you are not a writer here, it's unlikely you will get much publicity.

 
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