George Gömöri
1,001 Nights to Remember
The Adventures of Sindbad
By Gyula Krúdy (Translated and with an introduction by George Szirtes)
New York Review Books 205pp £8.99 order from our bookshop
The phenomenal success of Sándor Márai’s Embers throughout Europe and in most English-speaking countries illustrates the previously untapped audience for the now near-legendary world of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. This era before the First World War has the odour of overripe fruit and slightly musty furniture, and its protagonists suffer from divided loyalties or from complications of the heart – either because they are desperately in love or because of their inability to fall in love. Gyula Krúdy’s The Adventures of Sindbad, now out in paperback, is a classic from that period. For lovers of Márai’s fiction it will be of interest to note that he considered Krúdy to be one of his masters.
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Perception is a weird thing. Lawrence Durrell saw Hydra as a ‘great horned toad’ but Henry Miller thought it resembled a ‘huge loaf of petrified bread’. Niko Ghika painted it as a series of neat white and orange squares.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-call-of-the-wine-dark-sea
The minimalist Fumio Sasaki 'confesses that as he began to purchase fewer consumer goods, his meals shrank in size. He decluttered and lost weight. Accumulation is not just an economic way of life but a form of embodiment too. Enlightenment is reduction.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/gardens-of-emptiness
'The river’s desecration mirrors Colombia’s long history of violence: "for years we treated it like a sewer," says Ahmed, a survivor of a particularly brutal paramilitary massacre, "just like we treated each other".'
Patrick Wilcken on the Magdalena.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/troubled-waters-3