The City Builder
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Condition: Good to fair. Jacket: good, worn/faded (refer to image). Page Condition: Good - possible tanning. Markings: possible previous owner inscription.
In the grey, suffocating monotony of a nameless Eastern European city, a municipal planner confronts the moral weight of his life's work — the roads, the buildings, the bureaucratic decisions that have quietly shaped and constrained an entire population. The City Builder by George Konrád is a haunting, interior monologue that chronicles one man's reckoning with complicity, power, and the silent violence of urban planning under a totalitarian regime. The novel unfolds not through dramatic action, but through a relentless, almost hypnotic stream of consciousness that strips away the professional façade to reveal a man deeply implicated in the system he serves. Konrád, one of Hungary's most celebrated dissident intellectuals, argues through this work that the built environment is never neutral — that every city is a monument to the ideology that conceived it. Translated from the Hungarian by Ivan Sanders, the novel resonates far beyond its Central European setting, presenting a universal meditation on guilt, memory, and the individual's uneasy relationship with institutional power. Rich with philosophical density and written in prose of extraordinary precision, The City Builder leaves the reader asking an unsettling question: at what point does building a city become an act of oppression?
Author: George Konrád
Format: Hardback
Genre: Modern fiction
Condition remarks:
Condition: Good to fair. Jacket: good, worn/faded (refer to image). Page Condition: Good - possible tanning. Markings: possible previous owner inscription.
In the grey, suffocating monotony of a nameless Eastern European city, a municipal planner confronts the moral weight of his life's work — the roads, the buildings, the bureaucratic decisions that have quietly shaped and constrained an entire population. The City Builder by George Konrád is a haunting, interior monologue that chronicles one man's reckoning with complicity, power, and the silent violence of urban planning under a totalitarian regime. The novel unfolds not through dramatic action, but through a relentless, almost hypnotic stream of consciousness that strips away the professional façade to reveal a man deeply implicated in the system he serves. Konrád, one of Hungary's most celebrated dissident intellectuals, argues through this work that the built environment is never neutral — that every city is a monument to the ideology that conceived it. Translated from the Hungarian by Ivan Sanders, the novel resonates far beyond its Central European setting, presenting a universal meditation on guilt, memory, and the individual's uneasy relationship with institutional power. Rich with philosophical density and written in prose of extraordinary precision, The City Builder leaves the reader asking an unsettling question: at what point does building a city become an act of oppression?