Memento Park

A Novel

By: Mark Sarvas

Narrated by: David Ledoux

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’ 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?

©2018 Mark Sarvas (P)2018 Macmillan Audio

Critic reviews

2019 American Book Award Winner

What an absolute toenail of a main character

Listening to this is a second time , I’m really hit with how truly awful the character of Matt santos is. There is absolutely nothing redeeming about him. He is jealous and suspicious of his beautiful fiancé, who he cheats on, critical of art whether it be silly soap operas he is staring in, or masterwork paintings. He is not particularly hard working , friendly, gracious or respectful or anyone in his family or seemingly the world. Every character he introduces with this sort of underlying disdain or suspicion, like they are enemies to be skirted or sneered at behind their backs. I’m all for this writing style , in fact in his first book the author made the pitiful, petty nature of his main character the point of it all, and showed how much room he had to grow even into middle age. But this time round, no amount of brilliant language, interesting takes on religion and family and legacy can redeem this hopeless doorknob of a man who fails to really face any punishment for his mundane awfulness . Brilliantly written, cool story. But man does this guy need to get slapped with about a hundred parking tickets, horrible tax returns and plenty of dog turds in his mailbox.

Please try to get narrators who can pronounce Hebrew correctly

I often listen to books with Jewish themes and it would seem easy for audiobook producers to just ask how the Hebrew words are pronounced so when they are not butchered so that one is taken out of the narrative. It happens constantly.

As far as this story, it was very well written, but for me felt like too much internal monologue with very little action to keep the plot moving. Plus there were really no appealing characters so it was generally depressing with little resolution.