There are family sagas that unfold a family’s story through strong male characters, others through resilient women who have endured much suffering – My Father Sent Word does so through lost generations of men.
Erik, a very successful writer nearing fifty, has just survived a grave illness. He has also just recently become a father, and realized that he is still struggling with guilt and anger towards his long-dead father, a flamboyant, rebellious young man who dreamed of escaping village life but succumbed to alcoholism at a relatively young age. He embarks on a journey of painful self-discovery, unravelling the family’s past and discovering inherited patterns that were passed down from father to son for generations.
One of the first scenes describes a television interview with a renowned psychiatrist where Erik is told bluntly that he is responsible for his own illness, while the last chapters are a painfully sincere and detailed description of Erik’s father’s self-destructive behaviour and sinking into alcoholism and disgrace.
My Father Sent Word is a story about a generation that struggled to find its place during the Communist era and even more so after the regime change, and about another generation that must now come to terms with this inheritance.
It wasn’t that he had failed because he messed up; no, it was because people like us don’t get to succeed.
If you’re born a peasant, you stay a peasant. The caste system isn’t roulette or a lottery – there’s no lucky roll, no winning ticket from the depths of the Great Hungarian Plain.
Product details
ISBN 978 963 14 4491 9
2024, hardback
576 pages, 6999 HUF
Magvető Rights 
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