Carnival

Literary history often refers to the XX. Called one of the most important novels of 20th century Hungarian - and we can safely say European - literature, Karneval is one of Béla Hamvas' most important and largest-scale works, the "fire child with ten thousand skins", i.e. the story of the realization of the Spirit, a "catalogue of fate", or - as Hamvas says - the " a big mirror in which I look at and measure the whole of myself in the spirit of serenity and humor. A complete self-view, a view of the world, fate, life, and a complete liquidation." This carnival is therefore a journey towards the center of our being, and as such, it revives the traditional topos of myth, fairy tale and epic in the images of boarding a ship, wandering, and going to hell. Not only the epic comes to life in these figures, but also the structural-compositional frame and structure of the different novel types: Karneval evokes, for example, the plot weaving of the traditional family novel, the development novel and the detective novel, but at the same time, even this attempt at classification and definition does not exhaust the maximum describability of this text. . The complicated novel world, fugato story of Karneval begins with a sentence that lacks the beginning, and the last sentence is left half-finished. In other words, this is a timeless, never-ending conversation that hopes for a personal word that brings presence and encounter instead of dispersion. Karneval is a significant stage in post-James Joyce novel writing in terms of its relationship to both language and myth. Humorous and witty, rich in unexpected twists and turns, at the same time deep and thought-provoking, encouraging self-examination. The world of the novel, despite its seeming lightness, is multifold complex (society sketch, grotesque parody, layer of symbolic meaning) - however, we find a perfect balance and correspondence between the different layers. Self-search is the basic motif and also the most important thread of the work. And with this, Karneval fulfills another important function: it helps to navigate the confusion of existence. It gives meaning to all the things that happen in the world - to all of us. In the approximately seventy years that have passed since the novel's completion (1950), it has not once received the opportunity worthy of its rank to be published in the one-volume, classic form dreamed up by Béla Hamvas. Our publisher wants to fill this more than half-century-old gap now. The book was made with two different covers. We are unable to accept orders for a specific cover. Different covers are randomly added to orders.