Novel
The now-classic novel by Ádám Bodor was first published a quarter of a century ago, in 1992. Set in a mountainous landscape that feels at once familiar and lunar, the story depicts the workings of a totalitarian system with deep irony and dark humor, within a strictly confined, sparsely populated and grotesque world.
Sinistra appears at once stubbornly real and unimaginably absurd. Ádám Bodor’s timeless classic leads us into a mysterious world where nature is astonishing and self-contained, where people speak little but bear eloquent names. It is a barren, desolate landscape—yet one the author describes with mesmerizing beauty.
With this novel, Ádám Bodor succeeds in creating a reality beyond time and place, in the darkness of human consciousness.
Reading Ádám Bodor, we do not think of words at all: we think of humiliation, helplessness, hope, frost, rime, forest, stench, bear, brandy, man, woman. Of velvet-bottomed Elvira Spiridon, of Aranka Westin with her great white thighs, of Connie Illafeld, who turned from a lustful fairy into a hairy beast, of Bebe Tescovina, whose eyes glow at night like a lynx’s. …Whether all this is realism, surrealism, or magic—it’s hardly worth pondering these days. Or perhaps it never was? It seems increasingly certain that someone is dreaming us. After this book, with growing curiosity and constant dread, we might ask: what if that someone wakes up? Who? (Péter Esterházy)
Product details
ISBN 978 963 14 3547 4
2017 (first published: 1992), hard cover with jacket
176 pages, 120×200 mm
3499 HUF
Rights sold
English, New Directions
French, Cambourakis
Polish, Czarne
Italian, e/o
Spanish, Acantilado
German, Ammann
Bulgarian, Atelie AB
Danish, Heureka
Czech, Havran
Croatian, Meander
Estonian, Voluri Tagasitulek
Norwegian, Glyndendal Norsk
Russian, Jaziki Slavyanskoy Kulturi
Romanian, Humanitas
Serbian, Dereta
Slovak, Slovart
Slovenian, Modrijan
Complete English text available
Magvető Rights 
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