Cobblestone - Tapa blanda

Acclaim for Cobblestone

"Ultimately the focus of Cobblestone is not crime, but time...a celebration of narrative itself as irresistible intrigue - for which the detective story is the ultimate metaphor - with a ludic sense of the essentially uncontainable phenomenon of time... [shows] inexhaustible invention, fastidious authenticity, convincing seriousness and hilarious frivolity." Prof. Richard Aczel, London School of Slavonic & East European Studies

"The epigraph...is not verbal but consists of four bars of the Ricercare movement of Bach's six-part Musikalisches Opfer. This is Bach's most formal polyphonous composition. This refers to the novel's close composition and polyphonous nature.... Important prose on a grand scale." PEN Review

"One of the greatest masters of modern Hungarian writing, he has renewed the structure of the novel...making it an inventive and spiritual adventure." Salon du Livre

"The characters are, without exception, exciting, mysterious and complex, and of course the city also plays an important role in the novel, even though nowadays many of the old streets and buildings have disappeared or been transformed. For filming, it is a thrilling and complex set of scenarios... following the logic of the storyteller travelling in time." Gyula Gazdag, Sundance Film Production Workshop

"[A] quest to understand the human condition, framed in a detective story...switches from the late nineteenth century to the Stalinist Rakosi era of the fifties, and, as the novel progresses, to the moral and social morass of the Kadar regime's 'goulash communism'. The narrative structure is like a mosaic." World Literature Today

"Lengyel's ambitions extend either side of the Hapsburg era, back to man's first stabs at narrative structure and forward to the last years of the People's Republic, in an elaborate historical sweep dedicated to the proposition that, throughout it all, 'Hungary was still there' ( a phrase that one of the narrator's fellow-writers has particular trouble getting past the censors). The national history lesson is clearly told, but the low-life settings and cops-and-robbers shenanigans are more universal pieces of genre writing." Times Literary Supplement

Ranging through a history of changing empires, monarchies, countries, regimes, religions, down to the disappearing shop-fronts and street names, Hungary is always there, through the Millennium celebrations over a century ago, amid the exhausted last days of communism, and even under today's "illiberal democracy."

"A vast, sprawling novel linking a meticulously plotted jewel theft in 1896 Budapest to the impulsive crime of passion that sinks the plotters - and to the history of modern Hungary, of the anonymous narrator's family, and of life on earth.... A heroically scaled assault on narrative and causality.... Ulysses-like." KIRKUS

"More science fiction than a detective novel, not the usual cynical detective novel, but the big story of the early twentieth century throughout Europe, with the streets and brothels of Budapest at its center.... A fascinating mosaic of the underworld of Budapest, as well as a fantastic heist story." International Noir Fiction