Every Year he returned to the streets of Budapest to walk the streets where he had ‘found’ himself as an 18 year old boy. This year, something isn’t right, and the streets don’t feel the same; this year, the streets are walking him.
A novella for lovers of art-house cinema, translated literature, and the romance of the European continent, Budapest Requiem is an addition to the popular tradition of the flaneur novel, and an “elegiac and dream-like vision” (Helen Garnons-Williams, Penguin Random House) of the city where illiberal democracy was born. “Intense and startling…quirky, witty and philosophical” according to Jackie Kay, the story explores how this place has set Europe on a course to right-wing populism. “A miniature masterpiece” (Anna Hope - Albion, The Ballroom, Wake), it references the translated literary novel of the 1930’s (Stefan Zweig, Jaroslav Hasek, Franz Kafka) and reminded Francis Bickmore (Canongate) of “one of the European greats, like Kundera.”
It is a direct homage to Antonio Tabucchi’s Requiem: An Hallucination, and the idea of setting the audiobook to music came from Tabucchi’s own thought about his technique, as well as the novellas themes. “I chose to play my music not on an organ, which is an instrument proper to a cathedral, but on a mouth organ that you can carry around in your pocket, or on a barrel-organ that you can wheel through the streets…I’m happy with the noises that drift up from the street, which bear no message, and are lost, just as we are lost.”
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