MAGDA DENESCastles BurningA magnificent contribution to the literature of childhood and war."I begged, and often my brother obliged. In the dark of night, when I couldn't sleep, Ivan told me fairy tales in a whisper. All the stories began, in the traditional Hungarian manner, 'Once there was / where there wasn't / there was once a Castle / that twirled on the foot of a duck.' " There are few female figures in literature as riveting as the precocious nine-year-old Magda Denes who narrates this story. Her stubborn self-command and irrepressible awareness of the absurd make her, in her mother's eyes, "impossibly sarcastic, bigmouthed, insolent, and far too smart" for her own good. When her family goes into hiding from the fascist Arrow-Cross, she is torn from the "castle" of intimacies shared with her adored and adoring older brother and plunged into a world of incomprehensible deprivation, separation, and loss. Her rage, and her ability to feel devastating sorrow and still insist on life, will reach every reader at the core. Recounting an odyssey through the wreckage and homelessness of postwar Europe, Castles Burning embodies for us a powerful personality, a stunning gift for prose and storytelling, a remarkable sense of humor, and true emotional wisdom. "As important as Schindler's List, as emotionally complex as Au Revoir Les Enfants, Castles Burning takes us into previously uncharted psychological territory. . . . This is the book that I myself have hungered for."--Louise DeSalvoMagda Denes, Ph.D., is a psychoanalyst in private practice in New York. She is a professor in the postdoctoral programs in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy at Adelphi University and New York University, a past president of the New York State Psychological Association, and author of In Necessity and Sorrow: Life and Death in an Abortion Hospital. 1997 / hardcover / ISBN 0-393-03966-8 / Photographs / 352 pages / history/biography | |||||
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