The City Builder — George Konrad

An architect in an unnamed city considers his life, his work, and the many-layered history of the city he and his family—architects all—have contributed to building. In the days after World War II—during which American bombers destroyed much of what his father built—he becomes a Stalinist planner and realizes that the power of the nobility, the wealthy and the bourgeois has been usurped by technocrats. Vanished by those technocrats into the communist underworld of torture and imprisonment, he is eventually released into a post-Stalinist world and becomes the chief builder in a provincial town. Told with wit and elegance by one of Hungary’s greatest novelists, The City Builder is one of the most important and impassioned books about the indignities of living in—and contributing to—a cruelly depersonalized society.