TRANQUILITY

Book ID/图书代码： 04300007B17009

English Summary/英文概要： Tranquility is a living seismograph of the internal quakes and ruptures of a mother and son trapped within an Oedipal nightmare amidst the suffocating totalitarian embrace of Communist Hungary. Andor Weér, a thirty-six-year-old writer, lives in a small apartment with his shut-in mother, Rebeka, who was once among the most celebrated stage actresses in Budapest. Unable to withstand her maniacal tyranny but afraid to leave her alone, their bitter interdependence spirals into a Sartrian hell of hatred, lies, and appeasement. Then Andor meets the beautiful and nurturing Eszter, a woman who seems to have no past, and they fall wildly in love at first sight. With a fulfilling life seemingly within reach for the first time, Andor decides that he is ready to bring Eszter home to meet Mother. Though Bartis’s characters are unrepentantly neurotic and dressed in the blackest humor, his empathy for them is profound. A political farce of the highest ironic order, concluding that “freedom is a condition unsuited to humans,” Tranquility is ultimately, at its splanchnic core, a complex psychodrama turned inside out, revealing with visceral splendor the grotesque ideal that there’s nothing funnier than unhappiness.

Chinese Summary/中文概要： 36岁的作家安多尔维尔与他卧病在床的母亲一起，居住在一间狭小的公寓内。他的母亲罗贝卡曾是布达佩斯最富盛名的舞台演员之一，而久病不起后她的性格大变，狂躁暴怒的脾气使得安多尔忧心忡忡，但也不忍离她而去。
两人相互依赖，却又彼此仇恨，正当这对母子的关系变得愈发病态与荒谬之时，安多尔遇见了美丽迷人的艾西塔，两人一见钟情，纷纷坠入爱河。安多尔决定带艾西塔并介绍给母亲……
巴提斯笔下的人物多为顽固不化的神经质患者，他们细腻地演绎着一场震撼人心的黑色幽默。这场闹剧充满了耐人寻味的暗讽，书名《平静》，平静下却暗藏着直击心灵的风起云涌，巴提斯的这本小说更像是一部风格怪异却无比成功的心理剧，不仅将此间人物刻画得入木三分，也揭示了他所描绘的荒诞世界的核心：没有什么比人类的不幸更可笑的了。(Ruby)

Awards/获奖情况：版权已售：The Brazilian Portuguese (Record), Bulgarian (Gutenberg), Croatian (Fraktura), Estonian (Eesti Keele Sihtasutus), French (Actes Sud), German (Suhrkamp), Hebrew (Modal), Hungarian (Magveto), Norwegian (Cappelen Damm), Polish (WAB), Romanian (Polirom), Serbian (Laguna), Slovakian (Slovart), Spanish (El Acantilado), Swedish (Norstedts) and Turkish (Destek Yayinlari) translation rights have been sold.

“The first work by Bartis to be translated into English follows Andor Weer through 15 years dominated by his oedipal relationship with his agoraphobic mother, Rebeka, while, outside, Hungary transitions from Soviet satellite to independent state. Star of Hungarian stage and screen, Rebeka is humiliatingly demoted from lead actress to supporting role in an underhanded bid to pressure her into convincing her daughter, a concert violinist, to return to Hungary. Instead, Rebeka declares her daughter dead and retreats into her apartment, where she remains until her death. Andor becomes complicit in his mother’s isolation and fuels the growing oddity of their relationship by writing brief letters to his mother as though they were written by his sister. Meanwhile, his girlfriend, Eszter, grows increasingly unstable as Andor refuses to leave his mother for her. Oddly beautiful and unsettling, the novel boldly illustrates the lengths people go to in securing their own private hells.”--- Publisher’s Weekly **starred review**

"Tranquility is a moving, emotionally complex, subtle, shocking novel (.....) Bartis comes close to exemplifying Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s wonderfully provocative comment that one has to be a little bit dead to be really funny. (...) Bartis creates an atmosphere of believability in this novel without forsaking the use of irony." ---Tom McGonigle, The Los Angeles Times

“Reading like the bastard child of Thomas Bernhard and Elfriede jelinek, TRANQUILITY is political and personal suffering distilled perfectly and transformed into dark, viscid beauty. It is among the most haunted, most honest, and most human novels I have ever read.”---Brian Evenson

“[Tranquility] is a dark novel, one of the darkest to have emerged from contemporary Hungarian literature. And at the same time, as far as human psychology and political farce is concerned, it is one of the most illuminating. That’s right: the drama- one of well-nigh classical (or at least Dostoyevskian) proportions – has many dimensions. And the Tranquility of the title remains an unattainable topos of longing”---Ilma Rakusa

“A veritable seismoraph of the internal disasters blanketed by totalitarianism, this tumultuous novel is illuminated by the power of its characters and by the stormy writing of Attila Bartis, who with this masterful work, will be elevated to the rank of the best authors of Central Europe.”---Actes Sud

Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

“Even the rawest scenes (of eroticism but also of violence) are precise, written in a perfectly controlled syle. What is surprising (and Bartis has been compared at once to Camus and Sartre) is the total absence of cynicism. All the while practicing black humor, the author remains close to his characters, never denouncing them, avoiding oversimplification.”---á la page

About the Author/作者介绍： Attila Bartis，匈牙利作家，他曾被欧洲广大读者誉为中欧最富创造力的文学作家之一。Attila在获得了摄影学位后，于1995年出版了他的第一部小说《A Séta》。而《Tranquility》是他的第一部被译为英语的小说，获得了“蒂博尔德里奖”（Tibor Déry Prize）和2001年“桑德尔马劳伊奖”(Sandor Márai Prize)。
Attila Bartis, born in Targu Mures (Marosvasarhely), Romania, has been hailed by readers across Europe as one of the most highly inventive Central European literary mavericks writing today. After completing his degree in photography, Bartis published his first novel A Séta in 1995 along with a collection of short stories. He was awarded the Tibor Déry Prize and the Sandor Márai Prize in 2001 for Tranquility.

1956年匈牙利革命后，Imre Goldstein逃到美国，并在那里获得戏剧博士学位。1974年移居以色列。他翻译了许多作品，包括《A Book of Memories》、《The End of a Family Novel》、《Love, Fire, and Knowledge》、以及《A Lovely Tale of Photography》等等。Imre Goldstein也曾翻译了许多匈牙利及犹太语的戏剧和诗词。目前他出版了自己的诗词和小说《November Spring》。
After the 1956 revolution in Hungary, Imre Goldstein escaped to the United States where he earned a PhD in Theater. Since 1974, he has been living in Israel. He has translated A Book of Memories, The End of a Family Novel; Love, Fire, and Knowledge; and The House of Sorel by Pál Salamon from the Hungarian, as well as many plays, stories, poems, and essays from both Hungarian and Hebrew. Goldstein has also published several collections of poetry and a novel: November Spring (Novemberei tavasz).

Format:TRADE PAPERBACK

Rights Status/版权销售情况：Simplified Chinese/简体中文：SOLD

Complex/Traditional Chinese/繁体中文：AVAILABLE

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