A run-down poultry farm, which has seen far better days, sometime in the recent past, in Hungary. It is a place where some people have been left behind. Their personalities slowly disappear, like a haematoma. They’re not even on the map. The past is an amnesiac. The present is blind. But what might happen to them on the fringes? Quite a lot. Tibor Noé Kiss’s talent as a short story writer scours and lights up this borderland like some subtle, invisible drone. From the mosaic pieces of Get Some Sleep emerges a novel of stasis, its detailed, atmospheric prose accurately describing the desperate patterns of behaviour of passive structures and vegetative forms of existence, and the ultimate struggles of human beings, with a cruel clarity and an unrelenting irony that sometimes swerves into melancholy.
Pink knickers on the ground. On the knickers teddy-bears, bunnies and fawns sleep. The knickers fell out of a sports bag. She won’t be coming back for them.
Product details
ISBN 978 963 1431 73 5
2014, hard cover with jacket
144 pages, 125×197 mm
2690 HUF
Originally published in 1985 and republished in 2010 to great critical acclaim, Roman Numeral One is a poetic recollection of an impossible love story between a middle-aged writer who “has grown old but has never managed to grow up,” and an enigmatic, fiercely independent and frivolous dentist called Piroska. As the narrator waits for the long hoped-for return of his lover in a provincial thermal bath, he recalls in carefully ordered fragments his youth in war-torn Hungary, the poor but glamorous life of artists in the seventies – including his long therapeutic stay at Karlovy Vary during the film festival – and the curious events of his love with Piroska, constantly changing between sheer hopelessness and ruthless joy.
The title refers to a game where players have to hold out sitting on rails as long as possible despite a train rushing towards them. The novel is the story of two young lovers in post-World War II Hungary. Attila is a poor, aspiring writer, and Orsolya is the descendant of a rich bourgeois German family. Attila has felt drawn to Orsolya since they were children, but he dares speak to her for the first time only after the war, when she returns from burned down Dresden to her former home town near Budapest, still marked by her recovery from typhus. Because her family is German, their former riches are all gone, and they have to rebuild from scratch their pharmacy which they had once owned. In contrast, Attila seems to emerge as a winner under the new socialist rule – so the two form an unlikely coalition turned upside down. But the obstacles Attila and Orsolya face are strikingly similar to the old days.
The Hungarian town of Törökszentmiklós was held in a grip of terror by a serial killer between October 1953 and August 1954. Five young girls disappeared without trace during those months until a young woman by the name of Piroska Jancsó was arrested in the autumn of 1954 who was later sentenced to death for her crimes.
Hailed as a surprisingly mature first volume, Unhappiness at the Aurora Housing Estate (2014) is a collection of fourteen short stories organized in three cycles. The narrators and main characters of these stories are often intellectuals – students, artists, scholars – and other middle-class characters who are trying to find their place in the world. Many of them are frustrated and self-reflective, intent on changing their lives and achieving happiness and success, yet more often than not they fail to do so. Their strategies and the difficulties they face are described with an irony and sharpness that does not spare anyone yet seems to understand everyone, from the successful performance artist to the grandmother who feels unloved by her family.
Magvető Rights 
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