Book description
In August 1785 Paris buzzed with a scandal that had everythingÂ-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
ageÂ-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
Antal Szerb was born in 1901 into a cultivated Budapest family of
Jewish descent. Graduating in Hungarian, German and English, he rapidly
established himself as an outstanding scholar, publishing books on drama
and poetry, studies of Ibsen and Blake, and histories of English,
Hungarian, and World Literature. His first novel, the
satirical-philosophical The Pendragon Legend, 1934, was set in London
and Wales. His acknowledged masterpiece, Journey by Moonlight, appeared
in 1937. The Queen's Necklace was composed, together with a third novel,
Oliver VII, amidst the wreckage of war: both were instantly banned. In
1945 Szerb died in a forced-labour camp in Western Hungary. A collection
of stories and novellas (Love in a Bottle), and three volumes of his
literary-critical essays, were published posthumously.
