"A sparkling slice of 18th century life"
PAUL BAILEY The Independent
"An 18th-century scam involving Marie Antoinette, an ambitious jeweller, a charlatan doctor and a countess on the make is the subject of this engaging book. Antal Szerb was a Hungarian novelist who wrote what he called this 'real history’ in 1942 and died in a labour camp in 1945. Knowing his fate lends poignancy to his witty, learned and illuminating portrayal of the ancien regime on the brink of the Revolution"
KATIE OWEN The Telegraph's Pick of the Paperbacks
"The Queen's Necklace is a wonderful book; both thoughtful and blasting, and another revelation of Szerb's light-footed erudition"
ALI SMITH
"Szerb belongs with the master novelists of the 20th century"
"Szerb belongs with the master novelists of the 20th century"
PAUL BAILEY Daily Telegraph
"May Szerb"s entry into our literary pantheon be definitive"
ALBERTO MANGUEL Financial Times
"Szerb is a master novelist whose powers transcend time and language"
"May Szerb"s entry into our literary pantheon be definitive"
ALBERTO MANGUEL Financial Times
"Szerb is a master novelist whose powers transcend time and language"
NICHOLAS LEZARD The Guardian
ABOUT THE BOOK
This book revisits the story of Marie Antoinette’s necklace in order to present a portrait of the age.
In August 1785 Paris buzzed with a scandal that had everything – an eminent churchman, a female fraudster, a part-time prostitute and the hated Queen herself. Its centrepiece was the most expensive diamond necklace ever assembled, and the tangle of fraud, folly, blindness and self-delusion it provoked. The humiliation the affair brought on the royal family contributed to their appalling deaths in the Revolution just four years later.
In this unusual, witty and often surprising version of the story, the great Hungarian novelist Antal Szerb takes the narrative as a standpoint from which to survey the entire age – including aspects of it seldom considered by more orthodox historians. The author’s vast knowledge is worn very lightly and the book teems with amusing anecdotes, but it is at heart a deeply personal work, a remarkable gesture of defiance against the brutal world in which it was written.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
In August 1785 Paris buzzed with a scandal that had everything – an eminent churchman, a female fraudster, a part-time prostitute and the hated Queen herself. Its centrepiece was the most expensive diamond necklace ever assembled, and the tangle of fraud, folly, blindness and self-delusion it provoked. The humiliation the affair brought on the royal family contributed to their appalling deaths in the Revolution just four years later.
In this unusual, witty and often surprising version of the story, the great Hungarian novelist Antal Szerb takes the narrative as a standpoint from which to survey the entire age – including aspects of it seldom considered by more orthodox historians. The author’s vast knowledge is worn very lightly and the book teems with amusing anecdotes, but it is at heart a deeply personal work, a remarkable gesture of defiance against the brutal world in which it was written.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Antal Szerb was born in 1901 into a cultivated Budapest family of Jewish descent. Graduating in Hungarian, German and English, he rapidly established himself as an outstanding scholar, publishing books on drama and poetry, studies of Ibsen and Blake, and histories of English, Hungarian, and World Literature. His first novel, the satirical-philosophical The Pendragon Legend, 1934, was set in London and Wales. His acknowledged masterpiece, Journey by Moonlight, appeared in 1937. The Queen’s Necklace was composed, together with a third novel, Oliver VII, amidst the wreckage of war: both were instantly banned. In 1945 Szerb died in a forced-labour camp in Western Hungary. A collection of stories and novellas (Love in a Bottle), and three volumes of his literary-critical essays, were published posthumously.
Translated from the Hungarian by Leonard Rix
ISBN 978 1 906548 08 7
Reviews
The Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/sep/19/queens-necklace-antal-szerb-review
