New review: Dezso Kosztolányi
For The National. Kosztolányi’s worth checking out — a writer with a great comic sense who was passionately apolitical in a time of political extremism. (I hope to get to his Anna Edes sometime. I’ve heard good things.) Though I liked Skylark quite a bit, I didn’t find it to be “perfect” as Deborah Eisenberg did. But it’s a poignant, funny, and gracefully drawn novel about coming to grips with hard truths. Unsurprisingly, New Directions and NYRB Classics are behind the re-releases. This is the second time I’ve written a piece for The National in which those two publishers had re-released titles by the same author a few months apart; the other was about Albert Cossery, and I’m glad to see they’ll be publishing his Proud Beggars in August. On with the revivals.
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