Summary
Tibor Varady: The Road to Yesterday
Stories from the lawyer's archive
Although it would be expected, "The Road to Yesterday" is not a continuation of Tibor Varady's previous book, the second book is in every respect a sumptuous upgrade, incomparably richer in terms of theme and genre. While earlier he only gave hints of autobiography, writing about himself only as much as he had to, The Road to Yesterday is a book of at least two, and then three, four, five streams, which alternate and intertwine. Writing about old judicial and extrajudicial cases, legal, but somewhat paralegal, Varady writes his biography, and then, in a very surprising way, a kind of autobiography, in which he shows the reader, but more importantly – and himself, why he was what he was in life. There are some other, perhaps more important, differences between the two books. While in the first Varada he is quite serious, although the narrator is extremely charming in that seriousness, Put u yesterday is an unexpectedly humorous book. The genre is a cross between a first-rate historiographical "little history" and documentary prose. Basically, the book is both. You can read it as a reliable testimony of the time, but also as an offer, shockingly generous, of a series of novelistic embryos, extraordinary prose works.
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