title: Host of Memories: Tales of Inevitable Happenstance
author:  Peter Rupert Lighte 
description: Lighte, a longtime Sinophile and J.P. Morgan banker, exploits both meanings of the title by taking on the role of solicitous tour guide--"As a hospitable host in this room, I will give a guided tour of its interior"--while curating his impressively detailed memories like precious artifacts... Lively, evocative autobiographical essays." --Kirkus Reviews
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  Heiligendamm, satellite image 2007
  
  Péter Nádas
  
  A Book of Memories
  
  Translated from the Hungarian by Ivan Sanders with Imre Goldstein
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Copyright © Péter Nádas 1997
  
  Originally published in Hungary in 1986 as Emélkiratok könyve, copyright ©
  1986 by Péter Nádas. Republished in 1994, copyright © 1994 by Péter Nádas.
  
  English translation © 1997 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
  
  ISBN 0 09 976631 0
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Author's Note
  
  It is my pleasant duty to state that what I have written is not my own
  memoirs. I have written a novel, the recollections of several people separated
  by time, somewhat in the manner of Plutarch's Parallel Lives. The memoirists
  might conceivably all be me, though none of them is. So the locations, names,
  events, and situations in the story aren't real but, rather, products of a
  novelist's imagination. Should anyone recognize someone, or—God forbid!—should
  any event, name, or situation match actual ones, that can only be a fatal
  coincidence, and in t