Memento Park

December 15, 2017
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 Kalman, 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.

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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.

February 15, 2018
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 Matyas 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.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)

Starred review from January 1, 2018

A nonobservant Jew of Hungarian ancestry, L.A. actor Matt Santos has acquired Hungarian artist Ervin Kalman'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 Kalman (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 fiancee, 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 Journal, LLC Used with permission.

November 1, 2017

Contacted by the Australian consulate, Matt Santos learns about a painting that may have been looted from his family in Hungary during World War II, and finding the truth means rummaging around in his family history and reconnecting with his icy father and lost Jewish faith. Meanwhile, he meditates on the meaning of art itself. From Elegant Variation blogger Sarvas, whose well-received debut novel, Harry, Revised, appeared in 2008.

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

January 1, 2018

A nonobservant Jew of Hungarian ancestry, L.A. actor Matt Santos has acquired Hungarian artist Ervin Kalman'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 Kalman (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 fiancee, 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 Journal, LLC Used with permission.