The Adventures of Sindbad (Central European Classics Book 5)

Goodreads helps you keep track of books you want to read. Want to Read saving…. Want to Read Currently Reading Read. Refresh and try again. Open Preview See a Problem? Thanks for telling us about the problem. Return to Book Page. In these marvellously written tales, Sindbad, a voyager in the realms of memory and imagination, travels through the centuries in pursuit of an ideal of love that is directed as much at the feminine essence as at his individual lovers. Whether the women he seduces and loves are projections of his desire, or he of theirs, is a moot question.

These short stories flow without In these marvellously written tales, Sindbad, a voyager in the realms of memory and imagination, travels through the centuries in pursuit of an ideal of love that is directed as much at the feminine essence as at his individual lovers. These short stories flow without a strict narrative framework Sindbad journeys between the past and the present and is merely a ghost in many of his adventures. Although Sindbad can move through time, it is time that proves his chief enemy, and youth that remains his real love.

This deeply autumnal book, full of resonances and associations, is an erotic elegy to the dying Habsburg empire. Paperback , pages. To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up. To ask other readers questions about Adventures of Sindbad , please sign up. Be the first to ask a question about Adventures of Sindbad.

Lists with This Book. Sindbad is a rake, an unrepentant philanderer, a seducer, a heartbreaker, and the Don Juan of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He is also dead. Now even when he was alive he was very possessive of the women he had seduced. As a ghost he is even more so. They are supposed to be faithful and pine for him all the rest of the days of their lives. He thought he perceived miraculous qualities in them, a combination of the fidelity of the saints with the virtues of the martyrs.

And how he would rage when one of them took up with another man though it was he who had done the leaving. The Hungarian population could not get enough of the adventures of this Lothario. His stories and his novels were serialized in magazines before being collected into books. The Austro-Hungarian culture was passionate about love and morbidly romantic about suicide.

In the crown prince of Austria, Rudolph, committed suicide with his girlfriend. Suicide was an epidemic among young males, but a problem with young females as well who saw death as something to rush towards than something to be avoided. Even now looking at the suicide rates of the countries that made up the old Empire they are still too high. Slovenia is 8th, Hungary is 9th and Austria is 29th in the world. Dismemberment of a country. When I was in Budapest I asked the tour guide about the high suicide rates. God turned his face away from us. We lost all sense of ourselves. I can still remember driving down Clement Street in San Francisco and seeing this woman dressed all in black with a big hat and a long veil.

She had high heels and stockings. She had blond wavy hair that spilled all the way down her back providing the only relief in color to her ensemble.

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She was pushing this old Victorian style baby carriage with the big buggy wheels up this steep hill. I can only think she was coming from or going to a funeral. She absolutely took my breath away. I think most men have a Rolodex of images of, in my case women, who usually unintentionally created a lasting mental image for us. I just pulled up another one of a calf wrapped twice with a long telephone cord as the woman walked back and forth across the room curling her hair around her fingers as she conversed on the phone.

I could do this all day. Sindbad wraps himself up in these images, being dead can sometimes be lonely, and such memories provided warmth for his ghostly bones.

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He visits his old flames and the woman named Monkey who was his longest lasting conquest and also his most loyal lover thinks of him differently now. I know you so well.

It is as if I had given birth to you. Sindbad comes back as a sprig of mistletoe on the belt of a Nun He soon was pining for the hair comb of a harlot. He does find an opening inhabiting a crypt in a church. For some months he took shelter in an empty crypt under the threshold of a highland church whose occupant had wandered off somewhere. All day he watched legs stepping over the stones and learned to recognize people by them.

Already there were a few well-known old acquaintances whose tap-tap he could tell from some way off, and he kissed the heels of beautiful women as they passed over him, sighing so violently that the flat stone above the crypt seemed to move.

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Budapest in this time period had more women than men and passions ran high. Assignations, passionate embraces, illicit meetings, clandestine lunches, and slavish devotion were pursued by not only single people, but just as assiduously by married people. Gyula Krudy's character encouraged his readership to pursue love at the cost of everything else. Budapest embraced the concept with open arms. A strange book, but one that conjured up my past when I pursued and sometimes was pursued. If you wish to see more of my most recent book and movie reviews, visit http: View all 29 comments.

May 30, Jonathan rated it really liked it Shelves: The lack of a fifth star may be due more to my mood than any failure of the text. When I put together my list for the Classics Club back in December , I included a few translations alongside various British and American novels I had been intending to read for a while. The Adventures of Sindbad comprises a series of stories and sketches featuring the titular character, Sindbad, a sort of Hungarian Don Juan, whose reminiscences of times past are recounted in this somewhat strange and haunting book. To read my review, please visit: There is a pale crust of tender nostalgic longing on the surface of this book.

You could taste the bitter lament of lost places, scents, voices, images. The fragmented line of the narrative feels like a dream, a misty tender dream reminding you of a strange place looks like home, even though you never saw it before. Wonderful If you read "the man without qualities", then you are familiar with the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but through the eyes of an Austrian writer. This is a good book to see the ot There is a pale crust of tender nostalgic longing on the surface of this book.

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This is a good book to see the other side, with its magical underground atmosphere. Ahhh, the cynicism of a man who has lived and loved for centuries, but still can't escape the gravitational pull of his numerous loves. The struggle for love and acceptance is apparently something that never goes away, even after death. Here is a brilliant evocation by Sindbad near the end of the book to give you the flavor: Stop my ears against words poured into it by women. Help me forget the scent of their hair, the strange Ahhh, the cynicism of a man who has lived and loved for centuries, but still can't escape the gravitational pull of his numerous loves.

Help me forget the scent of their hair, the strange lightning of their eyes, the taste of their hands and the moist kisses of their mouths. Lord, you who are wise, advice mw hen they are lying, which is always. Remind me that the truth is something they never tell.. That they never do love. Lord, up there, far beyond the tower, think occasionally of me, a poor, foolish man, an admirer of women, who believes in their smiles, their kisses, their tickling and their blessed lies.

Lord, let me be a flower in that garden where lonely women retreat in the knowledge that no one's by. Let me be a lantern in the house of love where women mutter and babble and sigh the same old words. Let me be the handkerchief into which they weep their false tears. Lord, let me be a gatepost ladies pass light-heartedly while clinging to the arms of their suitors. Lord protect me, never let me fall into the hands of women. Told as a couple of dozen small scenes with nearly as many women, the pacing and viewpoint shifts did throw me off initially.

The jump-cuts between the stories were just really jarring out of the gate. As I kept reading, however, I began to really appreciate the subtlety of the overlapping stories and interludes, and began to wallow in the flowery narrative. Pressie from Team Moxysox xxx. This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. Share your thoughts with other customers.

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What follows is that review: They all feature Sindbad, who is both roguish and rakish, a sort of composite of Casanova, Don Giovanni, and a number of randy Greek gods. He also is, according to one or more of the stories, over years old, dead, living in a crypt where he had been deposited after his suicide, or resurrected.

Sindbad's adventures all involve love and his pursuit and almost fetishistic worship of women seemingly all the women in Hungary and their infatuation in turn with being loved, pursued, and worshiped. Otherwise, there is little plot or action. But there is plenty of atmosphere - a dense fog, a miasma of veiled eroticism, kisses stolen in the night, decadence, nostalgia, and ultimately death and decay. There also is a plenitude of extraordinarily rich and lush writing and striking, fresh conceits.

One example will have to suffice: That was Sindbad in his youth - a tireless voyager, a friend to women, a knight errant for those in sleepy provincial towns; he was the last worldly thought of virgins about to enter convents and the hope of the ageing. When the affair was over he would retreat to the sighing boughs of the damp and melancholy graveyard and spend a whole year listening to the drumming of the rain and, when this too grew tedious, he might engage in conversation with his dead relatives who lay to either side of him in the crypt.

One particularly worm-eaten old great-uncle tended to toss and turn in his grave. He had had four wives when alive and two or three lovers beside them at any one time, and was still anxious to reassume the flesh: It seems to me, however, that the opening story in this volume, "Youth", is somewhat atypical and makes for an odd introduction to the collection. Much more representative are "The Night Visitor" or "The Unforgettable Compliment," and I would recommend beginning with either or both of them, saving "Youth" for near the end.

But the stories gradually, stealthily, enveloped and captivated me. But be forewarned, these stories are so rich and decadent that, like eating chocolate truffles, consuming more than one or two at a time can be a surfeit. Gyula Krudy is one of several very accomplished Central European writers from the first half of the 20th Century who only now are becoming known, through recent translations, to the English-speaking world.

Two others are Sandor Marai and Joseph Roth. According to the useful Introduction to this volume by the translator George Szirtes, Krudy, who was Hungarian, wrote 50 novels and 3, short stories during his year life. If that is somewhat confusing, welcome to Krudy's world of Sindbad, where there is much confusion -- or better, ambivalence -- about what is real and what is illusory.

But there is plenty of atmosphere -- a dense fog, a miasma of veiled eroticism, kisses stolen in the night, decadence, nostalgia, and ultimately death and decay. That was Sindbad in his youth -- a tireless voyager, a friend to women, a knight errant for those in sleepy provincial towns; he was the last worldly thought of virgins about to enter convents and the hope of the ageing.

It seems to me, however, that the opening story in this volume, "Youth," is somewhat atypical and makes for an odd introduction to the collection. I became interested in Central European literature having discovered the brilliant work of the late Sandor Marai he wrote the incredible novel "Embers". I bought the "Adventures of Sindbad" to read while on a trip to Budapest, and it's by a Hungarian writer I had never heard of-- Gyula Krudy. He is not as good an artist as the great Sandor Marai-- Krudy is a bit too much the self-conscious stylist.

But the "Adventures of Sindbad" has a melancholy and deliciously decadent charm all its own, and there is a hypnotic quality to Sindbad's endless musings about the nature of love and infatuation. Krudy, writing from the end of the 19th and into the early 20th century, anticipates certain modernist literary tendencies like stream of consciousness writing inflected with passages of magical realism Hungarian-style. All in all, this is an unusual work that deserves a new generation of readers and it definitely makes me curious about Krudy's other work. Stories of desire and longing, dreams and memory.

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Classic fiction from Hungary. One person found this helpful. See all 6 reviews. Amazon Giveaway allows you to run promotional giveaways in order to create buzz, reward your audience, and attract new followers and customers. Learn more about Amazon Giveaway. Set up a giveaway.

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