European Union Prize for Literature 2019
Réka Mán-Várhegyi’s novel paints a vivid picture of the life of young academics in Hungary at the beginning of the 21st century. Enikő, a thirty-something feminist sociologist returns to Budapest from New York, brimming with research plans. Armed with state-of-the-art research methods and theories, she leaves her husband, an American performance artist, in order to write a “real self-help book” entitled The Misery of Hungarians. Yet she finds herself struggling with writer’s block. Tamás Bogdán, a star lecturer at the university, a first-generation intellectual, is in a relationship with Enikő as well as with Réka, a student of them both. Réka, who is writing a novel, comes from a dystopian communist-style housing estate, a breeding-ground for neo-Nazi ideologies, which happens to be the subject of Bogdán’s research. The novel ends in Florence, with Enikő and another Hungarian sociologist bathing in the sea after giving their papers at a conference on the poverty and inequality stemming from globalization.
Magnet Hill is much more than a campus novel: through the struggle of the main characters, we glimpse several layers of contemporary Hungarian society, each with their particular milieu, history, prejudices and challenges, from leftist liberal intellectuals and aristocratic families to first-generation intellectuals from the provinces, as well as marginalized groups. This eminently readable, often hilariously funny novel touches upon a number of questions, ranging from female identity to the gaps between theory and practice as well as between the world as seen from the West and as viewed from Hungary.
“If you bring up Eastern Europe at these kinds of events, it can feel as if you’re talking about the moon, except that these days Eastern Europe is no longer of the slightest interest to anyone.”
“Oh, come now, that’s surely putting it far too strongly,” says Regina.
Enikő shrugs.
Product details
ISBN: 9789631436600
2018, flexicover
388 pages, 123 × 18 mm
3499 HUF
Rights sold
Albanian, Toena
Bulgarian, Colibri
Czech, Větrné mlýny
Croatian, VBZ
Italian, Spider and Fish
Macedonian, Artkonekt
Polish, Biuro Literackie
Serbian, Heliks
Slovenian, Mladinska knjiga
English excerpt available
Review on Magnet Hill on hlo.hu
Interview with the author on hlo.hu
Magvető Rights 
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