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Summary
Summary
After receiving an unexpected call from the Australian consulate, Matt Santos becomes aware of a painting that he believes was looted from his family in Hungary during the Second World War. To recover the painting, he must repair his strained relationship with his harshly judgmental father, uncover his family history, and restore his connection to his own Judaism. Along the way to illuminating the mysteries of his past, Matt is torn between his doting girlfriend, Tracy, and his alluring attorney, Rachel, with whom he travels to Budapest to unearth the truth about the painting and, in turn, his family. As his journey progresses, Matt's revelations are accompanied by equally consuming and imaginative meditations on the painting and the painter at the center of his personal drama, Budapest Street Scene by Ervin K#65533;lm#65533;n. By the time Memento Park reaches its conclusion, Matt's narrative is as much about family history and father-son dynamics as it is about the nature of art itself, and the infinite ways we come to understand ourselves through it. Of all the questions asked by Mark Sarvas's Memento Park -about family and identity, about art and history-a central, unanswerable predicament lingers: How do we move forward when the past looms unreasonably large?
Author Notes
Mark Sarvas began his literary career as the host of his influential literary blog The Elegant Variation . His debut novel, Harry, Revised , was published in 2008 by Bloomsbury and later in more than a dozen countries around the world, and was a finalist for the Southern California Independent Booksellers Association's 2008 Fiction Award and a Denver Post 2008 Good Read. His book reviews and criticism have appeared in The New York Times Book Review , Bookforum , The Huffington Post , The Barnes & Noble Review , The Modern Word , and the Los Angeles Review of Books (where he is a contributing editor). He lives in Los Angeles.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Sarvas's rich and engaging second novel is worth the decade's wait since his first, Harry, Revised. Nearing 40, Matt Santos has an undistinguished but lucrative acting career, a swimsuit-model fiancée, and the confidence of having life figured out. Matt's father, Gabor, a first-generation immigrant with whom he has a distant, contentious relationship, has raised Matt without connection to their Jewish identity and Hungarian heritage. Then authorities charged with returning Nazi-appropriated artworks notify Matt that a 1925 painting valued at several million dollars, stolen from his family during WWII, may be returned. The usually grasping Gabor refuses to accept the piece-of which Matt knows nothing-or explain its connection with their past; as Matt probes the painting's history and revisits his own religious and family roots for answers, his attraction to restitution attorney Rachel Steinberg and shifting vision of the father he has dismissed as cruel and indifferent throw him into tumult. Sarvas couples a suspenseful mystery with nuanced meditations on father-son bonds, the intricacies of identity, the aftershocks of history's horrors, and the ways people and artworks can-perhaps even must-be endlessly reinterpreted. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Informed that he may be the owner of Budapest Street Scene, a valuable painting looted from his family during the war, actor Matt Santos (who might well have been born Mátyás Szantos) is stunned. The war? Which war? he asks. But most bewildering is why his caustic immigrant father, a man who reveled in getting something for nothing, would deny his own claim to the painting and advise Matt to steer clear of the windfall. Investigating the small, and frankly, ugly artwork's origins and its connection with his Hungarian Jewish ancestors, Matt finds his placid southern California existence upended by events that occurred 70 years ago. He is drawn to Rachel, the beguiling, devout attorney handling the legal stuff; together, they travel to Budapest, where they steal moments in a communist statuary park, and Matt's rediscovery of his Judaism puts him in harm's way. If Sarvas' (Harry, Revised, 2008) plot twists in this heartfelt novel sometime seem aimed at a cinematic treatment, they are nicely balanced by more contemplative moments.--Driscoll, Brendan Copyright 2018 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
THERE ARE A NUMBER of con artists in Mark Sarvas's second novel, "Memento Park" - some heavy on the con; others, the art. Principal among them is Matt Santos, a C-list actor and the novel's narrator, who is more focused on telling his story than his acting. His life is upended when he learns that a valuable painting may have been stolen from his family's Budapest home during World War H. The painting, now in the hands of the IRS, could become his. Nazi-pilfered art crops up regularly in fiction ("There's no business like Shoah business," the Israeli diplomat Abba Eban reportedly said), and often the painting in question is conventionally beautiful, emblematic of a lost elegant Mitteleuropean world, a yearning for all that cannot be reclaimed. Not so in this case. The canvas, painted by the fictional artist Ervin Kálmán and worth a few million, is small, shabby and "frankly, ugly," Matt tells us in the novel's opening. His recalcitrant father, Gabor, who fled Budapest as a boy after his mother was murdered, wants no part of it. "There's nothing to tell," Gabor insists to his son with characteristic stubbornness. "No story, no painting, no money." There is a story, of course, a sly, searching, occasionally exasperating one. Matt tells it in retrospect over the course of one night he spends at an art auction house, his only companion a silent security guard he calls Virgil. "I am forever withholding this or that bit of truth as it suits me," Matt warns us, but he revels in his role as narrator, highlighting his authorial sleights of hand: "I know it's all illusion, Virgil, but illusion is what I do." These asides can feel overwrought at times, but the book generally hums along, its narrative self-consciousness lending intrigue, reminding us that writing is nothing if not a confidence trick. Matt's fraught relationship with his harsh, remote father makes up "Memento Park's" emotional center. Even his career choice harks back to Gabor, his "implacable audience of one." Quick to anger, allergic to any discussion of his dark family history, the elder Santos develops into the novel's richest character. Where other parents might say "I love you," Gabor's usual parting words to Matt are "Pushpushpush" His life's labor is a toy car collection (Corvettes, the crown jewels) he has amassed over the years. He keeps it behind glass, refusing to let his Americanborn son play with it. The father-son scenes are among the most moving in the novel. arvas is astute in portraying how relationships can calcify in childhood, and the exquisite pain of attempting to repair them in adulthood. ?U? HE FALTERS in his depiction of Matt's relationships with women. Matt's fiancee, Tracy, is a flaxen-haired model with a bleeding heart, "every Jewish boy's shiksa fantasy writ large." Rachel, the hotshot lawyer assigned to argue his restitution case, is an observant Jew and Tracy's opposite: Was there "something in her eyes, in the curl of her hair, that whispered 'home'?" While arvas seems well aware he's using clichés, awareness alone doesn't make them interesting. And the characterizations often feel shopworn: "Would she inspire me, protect me, if only I let her?" The book stayed with me, though. arvas tackles big questions - about what constitutes restitution, the nature of faith, the essential role of storytelling in our lives. A twist at the end, the book's ultimate con, is too good to spoil, and left me rethinking the characters and the story. It's a testament to Sarvas's skill that such a trick felt like a gift. ? ELLEN UMANSKY is the author of the novel "The Fortunate Ones."
Kirkus Review
When Matt Santos, a veteran Hollywood character actor, gets a call about a painting allegedly looted from his family by Nazis in 1944 Budapest, his life is thrown into personal, professional, and spiritual turmoil.The allure of the painting, by a tortured interwar artist named Ervin Klmn, has at the beginning little to do with art (Matt is no connoisseur) or money (he's already well-off) or even adventure (he has a steady stream of parts to occupy him and an impending marriage to a model, too). What inflames his interest is a mystery: why does his father, always a remorseless opportunist, want nothing to do with the return of the now very valuable painting? The elder Santos (the name has been anglicized, or hispanicized, from Szantos) lost his mother and many relatives to the Holocaust, moved to the U.S. a decade later, and became, for his only son, an intimidating cipher: gruff, laconic, a little cruel, a man most comfortable with the toy cars he collects and fusses over and sells. Matt knows his own view may be jaundiced, and the book's strength is his constant, agonized, questing revision of his sense of who the old man is and what the implications are for his own identity. The wrangle over the painting quickly plunges him into deep waters. Soon his romance is foundering thanks to an intense attraction to his devout and lovely lawyer; his professional life is imploding; and he's plunged into spiritual confusion as, for the first time, he begins to explore, and to embrace, the Judaism that his father abandoned. There are elements here that feel overdetermined (the godly and dying rabbi who vies with him for the painting, for example) or born of box-office considerations (the Hollywood and modeling milieu), but overall, Sarvas (Harry Revised, 2008) delivers a lively, thoughtful, psychologically compelling novel about the ties that bind, and the ties that fail to.A bit of a potboiler, but Sarvas transcends that label with skillful prose and well-drawn characters. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
A nonobservant Jew of Hungarian ancestry, L.A. actor Matt Santos has acquired Hungarian artist Ervin Kálmán's Budapest Street Scene through restitution after learning that the painting was apparently looted from his family during World War II. As the novel opens, Matt is at the auction gallery for the painting's sale when the night guard attracts his attention, and in his mind he relates the painting's history to the guard. In spare, elegant prose, Sarvas (Harry, Revised) relates two stories: Matt's own and that of Kálmán (1883-1944). The stories intertwine as Matt reveals how the painting came to his forebears in Hungary and played a role in saving members of Matt's family during the Holocaust. Crucially, we also learn about Matt's often tormented relationship with his father, who inexplicably refuses to discuss the painting. Along the way we meet Matt's beautiful fiancée, Tracy; Rachel, the lawyer who helps him with the restitution process; and a Chicago rabbi who also has a claim to the painting. VERDICT Because of its scope and deft handling of aspects of identity in matters of love, family, religion, and loss, this literary work is highly recommended to the broadest audience. [See Prepub Alert, 10/3/17.]-Edward B. Cone, New York © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.