Author: Gaspar Buzasi

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

Ádám Bodor

was born in 1975 in Leningrad. She is a literary historian and literary critic based in Hungary and Slovenia.

My Memory Came Back to Me

A book on dementia, caring and remembering

When her mother was diagnosed with dementia, Teri Szűcs started to take notes. She recorded the changes in her mother’s physical and mental state, their conversations, their daily routine, as well as their odyssey in the Hungarian health care system, which is hardly equipped for the growing number of patients suffering from dementia.

Though highly personal in tone, the notes and essays that added up to make this book achieved much more than merely record the hardships involved in a daughter caring for her mother. Teri Szűcs’s book is an important contribution to the growing number of narrations that chronicle the crisis of care in the Western world. It documents the life of those whose work consists of attending to someone else’s basic needs, as well as the inadequacy of a society that does not give them the support they need.

My Memory Came Back to Me is also a book about remembering and forgetting. Together with her mother, Raya, the author reconstructs Raya’s memories: her youth in Leningrad in the 1960s, with its cultural milieu; her historical and transgenerational traumas that are similar to those of millions of Soviet families; marrying a Hungarian man and moving to Budapest with him; and her struggle with multiple identities – Jewish, Soviet and Hungarian.

Raya’s husband and the daughter’s Slovenian partner, Maya, are also important presences in the book, and their role in the mother’s life gives occasion to the author to reflect on gender roles in society. Is caring a ‘feminine’ thing to do? Then what about a husband who is totally ‘masculine’ yet cares beautifully for his wife? Does a woman living in a lesbian relationship become a woman in the eyes of society only when she takes care of her mother?

Although the topics are extremely hard and painful, often even taboo, this is far from being a gloomy book. The author’s empathic and intelligent voice makes My Memory Came Back to Me an uplifting read.

I checked the notes I took during those sleepless nights: I am thinking of those who do this work. Helpers, carers. Mostly women who were raised to care anyway. I note that from a certain point of view, if someone gave me a stern look, they would observe that I don’t do anything. An invisible story: ‘she took care of her mother.’

Teri Szűcs

Rights sold
Polish, Wydawnictwo Dowody

Nine tales about the male condition

From Budapest to Prague and New York, Krusovszky’s male characters struggle with their past, their masculinity, their fatherhood or their wasted talent. As these boys and men grow into their roles and make decisions with more or less success, they often grapple with their inability to articulate what is happening to them.

In these well-crafted and intellectually stimulating pieces, Krusovszky examines human problems with nuance and sensitivity, be it family breakdowns, the dynamics of romantic relationships or the difficulties of reconciling artistic ambitions with bourgeois life.

Rights sold
German, Aufbau

Dénes Krusovszky

Born in 1964, Csaba Iglódi has worked as a journalist, publisher and an expert in branding and marketing communication. He is the founder and CEO of a consulting company for senior managers. Dreher Symphony is his first novel.

Dreher Symphony – Malt to Monarchy