A Guest in my Own Country

Praise for A Guest in my Own Country

“An East European might say that George Konrád’s adventures through two terror regimes and a major revolution have been what one would expect from someone unfortunate enough to have been born in that part of Europe. In reality, Konrád’s autobiography reveals much more than that: great tragedies, fabulous escapes, a complex personality, a great writer and beyond that, dignity and courage in the worst of circumstances.” —ISTVÁN DEÁK, Professor Emeritus of history at Columbia University; author of The Lawful Revolution: Louis Kossuth and the Hungarians, 1848–1849

“Konrád takes you into another country. Another world. His words allow you to feel his world. In intimate and luxuriant detail. The world of childhood, the world of war, of politics, of hatreds. The world of words and of longing. In illuminating his country, his world, Konrád illuminates our world.” —LILY BRETT, author of Too Many Men

“Konrád’s prose was never so luminous as in these moving yet clear-eyed and forthright recollections of his wartime childhood, his youth and early manhood under Communism, and of his life as a writer in the ‘soft dictatorship’ and after.” —IVAN SANDERS, translator, literary critic, and Adjunct Professor at Columbia University

“Emerging from the pen of a premier Hungarian intellectual, and spanning several turbulent decades, this vivid, unsentimental, candidly intimate memoir gives us an invaluable view of a complex history, and of a very Eastern European fate. Konrád’s affectionate recollections of his childhood; his astonishing account of growing up precociously at war; and his sharply etched vignettes of repression and dissidence, poverty and pleasures thereafter, are marked by grace amidst turbulence, honesty without bitterness, and by an admirable balance between skepticism and deep attachments. An important, illuminating, and ultimately hopeful book.” —EVA HOFFMAN, author of Lost in Translation and After Such Knowledge