Autobiographies of an Angel

“Gábor Schein is that rarest of elegists, endowed equally with a respect for history and an ecstasy of imagination.”—Joshua Cohen, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Netanyahus

"Narrated by the Angel of Ruin, Gábor Schein’s mesmerizing novel weaves the stories of Johann Klarfeld, an eighteenth-century soldier, surgeon, and crypto-Jew; and Berta, child of Hungary’s blood-soaked twentieth century yanked between Soviets and Nazis. ‘Fate is a mesh,’ Berta tells us. She’s describing Schein’s own intricate mesh of digressions that holds heartbreak and cruelty in a single otherworldly and majestic design. A mighty act of imagination, beautifully translated.”—Rosanna Warren

“Schein writes in a language that is free in time: accurate, crystal-clear, simple. He suggests that either everything is related to everything else, or that nothing is related to anything else, and that while contemplating the choice, before deciding, he will relate everything that he can. His brilliance is that while we follow him with great excitement and deep mourning in our hearts, he makes us understand that everything always happens again and always in the same way.”—László Krasznahorkai

“Wonder and horror, history and mystery, the eternal and the mortal—this haunting novel contains them all as it holds the reader in its spell. That a work so abundant with shape-shifting doubles comes to us in the mesmerizing translation of Ottilie Mulzet seems an eerie, even angelic, sort of poetic justice.”—Adina Hoffman

“Take two people two hundred years apart and watch as they, and all the figures time interposes, vividly grow into a single tragic, picaresque, funny, epic, glittering tapestry memorably woven into history. Now read on.”—George Szirtes