Of all Danilo Kis's books, Hourglass, the account of the final months in one man's life before he is sent to a concentration camp, is genera...
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reviews
Aug 22, 2011
Steve
rated it: 
This is my original review published in the San Francisco Chronicle in September 1990:
This almost annoyingly virtuoso novel, available in English for the first time just weeks before the reunification of Germany, provides a bracing reminder of how mundane the encroachment of terror can be.
Most of the book is written in a numbing question-and-answer format that trivializes anything and everything. Through it, the life of E.S., a 53-year-old Jewish man living in Hungary in 1942 More...
This almost annoyingly virtuoso novel, available in English for the first time just weeks before the reunification of Germany, provides a bracing reminder of how mundane the encroachment of terror can be.
Most of the book is written in a numbing question-and-answer format that trivializes anything and everything. Through it, the life of E.S., a 53-year-old Jewish man living in Hungary in 1942 More...
Jan 11, 2009
Brandon
rated it:
I've really liked all the Kis I've read, but this book is a cut above. The structure, the theme, the way the whole thing is handled. the man had incredible poise, if that makes any sense, and that is most apparent here. As I've said before, the guy writes mostly about death, childhood, and the Holocaust and I can't recall him ever, even one time, being corny or trite or predictable.
Jul 23, 2008
Alex
rated it:
I read this for a Balkan literature class and I know that as soon as you read "Balkan literature class" you either scoffed or laughed. This is an exceptional novel about one man's quest to save his family in time just before the Holocaust. The story is complicated, but beautifully written like Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury. Paritally inspired by true events, Danilo Kis witnessed the execution of one of his friends and saw his father taken away, never to return. His novel Garden
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Jan 02, 2011
Brent
rated it: 
Far too catechismical for my liking. It's as if Kis looked at Ulysses' penultimate chapter and thought "That would be great for half a book." And then there was the insufferable boredom of both subject and style...
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