In the summer of 1936, a young engineer from Bucharest arrives in a small town in Transylvania, promising to repair their busted turbine for the waterworks. Máté Kalagor is a man of ambiguous identity – Hungarian or Romanian? –known also as Matei Călugăru, and despite his best intentions has a hard time settling down. His tale is also that of 1930’s rural Tranylvania, a politically and ethnically diverse scene peopled by Romanians, Hungarians, Jews, Germans, Armenians –homestead owners, industrialists and intellectuals. As the title hints, this is truly a place belonging both to everyone and no one.
Then history tramples all over this enclave: royalist Romania, the antisemitic and anti-Hungarian Iron Guard, World War II, Soviet invasion. And if these weren’t enough, there’s an even deeper mystery to baffle an engineer: love. Kalagor gets married, meanwhile keeping up an affair with an older woman, and every so often he’s visited by a childhood love, Endza, the adventurous Armenian beauty.
Following the runaway success of his previous novel Story of a Stammer, Gábor Vida picks another unusual vantage point, not without irony, to describe resemblance and differences in a peculiarly 20th century Central-Eastern European story, halfway Hungarian and halfway Romanian, but as the subtitle fittingly suggests: Transylvanian through and through.
“A City for All and None is the story of people faced with perpetual change, whose lives are continually disrupted by history and who are thus incapable of directing their own fate.” (Orsolya Kolozsi, Könyves Magazin)
“It is easy being an ungrateful posterity, because we know not only what the old tales’ characters didn’t know, but also what we would advise them to do.”
Product details
ISBN 978 963 14 4272 2
2023, hardback
424 pages, 5999 HUF
Magvető Rights 
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