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Memento Park

A Novel

Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available

A son learns more about his father than he ever could have imagined when a mysterious piece of art is unexpectedly restored to him
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 Kálmán. 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?

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    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from January 22, 2018
      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.

    • AudioFile Magazine
      Narrator David Ledoux's somber, almost monotone, opening may put some listeners off, but one hopes they hang in there. Author Mark Sarvas's gift for telling a highly original story and creating indelible--if not always likable--characters will be their reward. Successful actor Matt Santos and his opportunistic, often cruel father have an antagonistic relationship. When Matt is contacted and encouraged to submit a claim for a painting stolen from his Jewish family by the Nazis, he finds it strange that his father isn't interested in pursuing the valuable work. While Ledoux grows stronger as the story unfolds, his understated delivery doesn't reflect Matt's transformation as he travels into his family's past, explores his relationship to his own Judaism, and learns secrets that alter his long-held image of his father. S.J.H. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine

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  • English

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