The Queen's Necklace - Tapa blanda

"A writer of immense subtlety and generosity, with an uncommonly light touch which masks its own artistry - Antal Szerb is one of the great European writers -- ALI SMITH Szerb belongs with the master novelists of the 20th century.A" - PAUL BAILEY Daily Telegraph "Szerb is a master novelist, a comedian whose powers transcend time and language." - NICOLAS LEZARD The Guardian The Queen's Necklace, Antal Szerb (Pushkin Press, GBP 12) Antal Szerb is another novelist, a Hungarian, whose work the Pushkin Press has championed here and who will intrigue the reader from first encounters with his novels The Pendragon Legend and Journey by Moonlight. The Queen's Necklace is based on the true story of a necklace which belonged to Marie-Antoinette and 'as with the Nibelung's treasure in the depths of the Rhine, the short period of time [the necklace] spent on earth was enough to alter the course of destiny.' When Szerb wrote the novel, the blend of historical fact and imaginative fiction he created was not used as much as it is by novelists now, but few have ever handled the form as well as he does. His novel is full of learning and very thoughtful - it vividly recreates a dramatic period of French history and reveals another side to a masterful writer. Read Szerb. He will haunt you."

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.