Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming
Ratings3
Average rating4.3
15
Ratings3
Average rating4.3
Baron Bela Wenckheim decides to return at the end of his life to the provincial Hungarian town of his birth. Having escaped from his many casino debts in Buenos Aires, where he was living in exile, he wishes to be reunited with his high school sweetheart Marika. What follows is an endless storm of gossip, con men, and local politicians, vividly evoking the small town's alternately drab and absurd existence
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This book had a lot of meaningful things to say but I'm not a fan of period-less prose or a writing style that might be too convoluted for an average reader to parse. Art and meaning should be accessible IMO, but that's a conversation for another day.
The story and the prose certainly provides a wealth of meaning to slowly wade through and is really good for a book club pick. Some parts and even whole chapters were almost incomprehensible to me, but overall I think there was at least some action that drove the reader along through the book. Some themes that I was interested in reading about were the fragility of memories, the hollowness of nostalgia, the often-disappointing experience of reliving an experience you had previously put on a pedestal, the conflict between capitalism and compassion, and indiscriminate exploitation for material gain. I kinda wish that we could just pick one or a few and develop those more fully though.
The last couple of chapters were particularly exciting and I actually couldn't put it down, which is not something I would've expected for this book. I'm not sure if the ending really drove home the points that Krasznahorkai had raised through the book but honestly I'm not mad at how dramatic everything went down. I felt like the book needed more drama.
