Joey Anderson’s Reviews > Iza's Ballad > Status Update

This novel gets better and better. One of the best I've read this year.

I would never have thought that I would identify with Hungarian characters, but I have. The novel is quite good in showing how a person can become alienated from their family members and their childhood homes simply through the process of education.

The old woman has been removed from her small town and the house where she lived with her departed husband for decades by her caring daughter to a modern Budapest. The daughter believes her aging mother will be happy in an apartment complex with all the modern conveniences of 1960, but the daughter does not understand that her mother feels comfortable living in the past since we are all nostalgic by nature.

As we get older, we not only cling to objects that carry no meaning to anyone else, but our memories that only speak to us and to others our age. It is not that time is fleeting, but the world that spins away from us. Very moving novel about a daughter, an elderly mother and her husband who has just passed.

Difficult reading. The novel opens with the death of Iza's father and how the mother and daughter (Iza) struggle with his death. These first two chapters are quite moving.