Overview
A trio of darkly elegant, women-centric novellas from a master of twentieth-century Hungarian literature. Mrs Kleofas' Rooster brings together three captivating novellas by Gyula Krúdy, originally written in the 1920s and now available in English for the first time. Each story centers on a woman protagonist: a timeless adventuress, a resilient single mother, and a seductive Budapest femme fatale, respectively. In the title novella, a roguish narrator listens to the thrilling life story of an ageless, mysterious woman whose journey takes her from a childhood of suffering to a career as a cunning accomplice in daring schemes. The next story, NN, follows the life of a steadfast single mother, Juliska, amid the rhythms of village life. In Autumn Meeting, Krudy's sharp wit unfolds through Rizili, a charming yet ruthless socialite who leads a suspended jockey on an intoxicating night through Budapest's City Park.
Reviews
""Krudy has been compared to his great contemporaries (Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Joseph Roth) and his great successors (Isabel Allende and Gabriel Garcia Marquez). Other comparisons come to mind. His work purrs with the fin-de-siècle urbane eroticism in Arthur Schnitzler's stories. His shifting viewpoints and streams of consciousness recall Virginia Woolf. Like Kafka, he's willing to let dream and reality mingle. He's ironic and wise about the human heart and life's futility, like Chekhov. . . . The more translations of this untranslatable genius there are, the closer we'll be to his shimmering, melancholy world.""--Los Angeles Times ""Praise for Gyula Krúdy"" ""Krudy writes of imaginary people, of imaginary events, in dream-like settings; but the spiritual essence of his persons and of their places is stunningly real, it reverberates in our minds and strikes at our hearts.""--The New Yorker ""Praise for Gyula Krúdy"" ""There is about Krúdy an absolutely railed-down otherworldliness. A brilliant spectrum where reality is just one possible colour . . .""--Michael Hofmann, The Times Literary Supplement ""Praise for Gyula Krúdy""
Author Information
Gyula Krúdy was a prolific Hungarian writer and journalist, best known for his atmospheric fiction rooted in nostalgia, dreams, and Budapest’s vanished world. Though his popularity waned before his death, Krúdy was rediscovered posthumously thanks to Sándor Márai’s homage to his iconic Sinbad tales, Sinbad Comes Home. Today, he is celebrated as a major figure in twentieth-century Hungarian literature. John Batki, born in Hungary, lives in the United States. His numerous translations from Hungarian literature include works by Attila József, Erno Szép, Géza Ottlik, László Krasznahorkai, and seven volumes by Gyula Krúdy.
