MY HAPPY DAYS IN HELL

by George Faludy ‧ RELEASE DATE: N/A

A remarkably articulate and adventurous memoir from an Hungarian poet buffeted about the world during and after WWII by both the Nazi and Communist dictatorships. It is a fluent, frighteningly real record of contemporary chaos, a fitting companion piece to fellow-countryman Arthur Koestler's Arrow in the Blue and Darkness At Noon. And Faludy, an ultra-sophisticate and all-round intellectual, even manages some surprising sequences like Gide's Immoralist, as he enumerates upon and enters into the dazzling ""decadence"" of Morocco, to which he had fled after escapades in Gestapo-haunted Budapest and Paris. After further expatriation in America- and here Faludy duly drubs the Roosevelt State Department for ""hair-raising dilettantism""- he returned to a Stalinized Hungary, was subsequently and incredibly denounced as a US agent, and eventually dumped into the lower depths of the forced labor camps. These passages describing the brotherhood of the damned and the sadistic stunts of the guards are both shocking and spiritually liberating: amidst so much inhumanity, it appears courage and conviction still have a chance. Tops.

Pub Date: N/A

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Morrow

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1963

Categories: NONFICTION