Synopses & Reviews
Hngary, 1956. Without a word, Katalin leaves her family and sets out for the West. Her husband, Kalman, abandons the family farm and begins a long journey through Hungary with their two young children, Kata and Isti. His only purpose is to keep moving. Staying with distant relatives in unfamiliar cities and villages for varying lengths of time, he shuns anything resembling a home or a steady life, sinking into depression that drives the children to create their own imaginary universe: Kata invents relationships with the people they meet during their long journey while Isti converses with the natural world around him. It is only in rare moments, on riverbanks and lakeshores where Kata and Isti swim with their father, that they experience moments of calm and wonder if they will ever see their mother again.
Review
PRAISE FOR
THE SWIMMER"An outstanding debut novel. Recalls the sunny creepiness of Günter Grass [and] introduces a potentially great voice in world literature."--The New York Sun
Review
"THE SWIMMERs greatest strength is in imagining what happens to those left in the wake of a mothers desertion."
Review
"[An] outstanding debut novel...[it] introduces a potentially great voice in world literature"
Review
"[A] spare, resonant debut"
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"Banks interest in how the imagination can fill absence and longing with portents is grounded in exceptional powers of description"
About the Author
Zsuzsa Bánk is the recipient of numerous prizes and fellowships and has already achieved great success in Europe with this, her first novel. She lives in Frankfurt.