A life in pieces

When the poet George Szirtes returned as an adult to Budapest, the city of his birth which he had left as a child with his family in 1956, he experienced what became an abiding fantasy. He imagined his mother going back to the family flat but, instead of sitting down in a chair, she carried on walking through the wall until she emerged as a plaster statue:

At that moment I realise… that Budapest is absolutely crammed with statues that were once people, people who had simply walked through the walls and become stylised allegorical figures, that this was their fate, hers, and mine too, come to that.

This exquisitely told memoir is crammed with similarly evocative and occasionally deeply unsettling images. As Szirtes carefully peels back layers of history, he brings his mother not exactly back to life. As we learn in a dramatic opening chapter she had taken her own life (an overdose) and the ambulance rushing her to hospital was involved in a crash, so she died, aged 51, at a road junction.