About the Roses

»I stood by the window and waited for the sun to set, because that was the rule, and if I didn’t want something bad to happen, I had to wait until it had set.«

With this sentence it begins, the life story of a narrator who, having suffered an existential crisis, has returned to his Serbian hometown – from the Belgian North Sea coast to the Tisza river, from West Flanders to the vast, empty skies of Vojvodina. The plot spans three decades, from the beginning of the Yugoslav wars to the present.

Having escaped military service, he works on his father’s rose farm. Fighting fear with self-imposed rules, his work cultivating and grafting roses comes to dominate his life. Roses are not so much a leitmotif in this work as a richly faceted prism through which to view the world. Years later, a serious illness and a crisis in his relationship throw him off track.

With compelling linguistic beauty, comparable in its calmness and overwhelming intensity to a work of minimal music, Zoltán Danyi’s masterful novel traces the mental and physical self-exploration of a man who works his way out of a dead end in his life by writing. A story of crisis and convalescence.
 

»This novel is a linguistic work of art, which in its urgency deserves to be placed alongside the work of the Nobel Prize–winner Jon Fosse.« Anton Thuswaldner, Salzburger Nachrichten

»Zoltán Danyi has written the most beautiful and challenging novel of the year, which many will describe as resembling a rose: beautiful on the outside, but when we look beyond the petals, we realise the secrets it holds.« Valuska László, Könyves Magazin

»About the Roses is more intimate, more emotional, more elegiac than his previous novel, and a much more sprawling, repetitive text, which eventually settles into the form of an elegant rose. But the rose is not just a form, for the protagonist, it is also life, healing, love, and freedom. « Sarolta Deczki, Könyvterasz

»A great artist of language and observation.« Ilma Rakusa

»The beauty of the language with which a manic narrator wrestles his demons, chapter after chapter, is astonishing.« Wolfgang Höbel, Der Spiegel on A dögeltakarító