Synopses & Reviews
Menyhért Lakatos (pron. Meñ-hare-t Luk-ut-oshe) (1926-2007), Hungary's preeminent twentieth-century Romani (Gypsy) writer, was the award-winning author of two novels, six other books of fiction, and a poetry collection. After a career as an engineer and as the manager of a brick factory with an all-Romani workforce, he became a sociologist and one of Hungary's--and Europe's--most important Romani leaders. In his forties Lakatos began publishing fiction, writing in Hungarian. His magnum opus, The Color of Smoke (Füstös képek), appeared in Hungary in 1975; its fifth edition was released in 2012. It has been published in several languages; in French it appeared as
Couleur de Fumee (Actes Sud, 2000); and in German, as
Bitterer Rauch. Ein Zigeuner-Roman (Deutsche Verlags Anstalt, 1983).
Ann Major (1928-) has brought several Hungarian books to English, including Paul Lendvai's The Hungarians: A Thousand Years of Victory in Defeat (Princeton University Press), and also translates from German. The author of a memoir, A Carpet of Jacaranda (Sydney Jewish Museum, 2013), she lives in Lane Cove, Australia.
Synopsis
FOR THE FIRST TIME IN ENGLISHa timelesstribute to one of the world s most marginalized peoples and the riveting tale of one boy s journey to manhood
Sweeping us into the world of the roma as fascism gathers force and the Holocaust looms on the horizon, The Color of Smokeis a thoroughly absorbing story that abounds in unforgettable characters. There is the adolescent narrator, torn between his people and a society that both entices him and rejects him. From his rise in school to his first sexual encounters, from hunger to police harassment, he treads a precarious path--one marked by moments of beauty and poignancy along with bawdiness, violence, and high adventure. And we come to know a people bound as much by a rich moral fabric as by the land and by the horses they love.
By an author who himself came of age in a Romani settlement during World War II, The Color of Smokeis a must read for anyone seeking a stunningly new, authoritative window onto the lives of the dispossessed--with haunting implications for today.Magisterial in scope and yet intensely personal, it combines beautiful prose with profound reflections on the human condition as only great literature can."
Synopsis
The first major novel about Eastern Europe's Roma, or Travelers (Gypsies), by a Romani author, The Color of Smoke is both a work of passion chronicling one young man's rise to manhood and an epic work that conjures up a dark era of world history. It is an undiscovered classic that has been published in several languages since its 1975 appearance in Hungary--but never before in English.
Inspired by the author's own boyhood in World War II-era Hungary, it is a beautifully written coming-of-age story of a Romani boy torn between the community of his birth and the mainstream society that both entices him and rejects him.