Author: Gaspar Buzasi

Zsuzsa Takács (b. 1938) is the doyenne of contemporary Hungarian poetry, winner of all the major Hungarian literary awards. She started publishing in the early 1970s, to develop a consciously understated, slightly elegiac lyric voice coupled with profoundly personal themes, addressing both private and historical traumas. Her work is widely anthologized, and has been translated into English by George Szirtes, Laura Schiff and Ottilie Mulzet, among others. She lives in Budapest.

The Deceptive-looking Guest

A volume made up of 17 short stories, introduced by a Dedication in memory of the author’s parents, The Deceptive-looking Guest is a harrowingly personal book that meditates on the interconnectedness of historical and personal, family traumas, and whose predominantly first-person narrators occasionally ”inhabit” the bodies and identities of strangers, close or distant family members, switching gender. Most of the stories walk the line between an enhanced, hyper-lucid perception of the world of objects and persons, and a pervasive oneiric, nightmarish mode, erupting in memorable
images, all the more intense for the rigorously bare language used. In a subdued way, these stories offer an anatomy of personal responsibility and of the functioning of dictatorships. Many also have as subtexts, or respond to, passages from the Divine Comedy, St. John of the Cross, Pessoa, or Borges—texts/authors with which the author engaged creatively, having also translated some. The setting is mostly Budapest, portrayed as a terrain of loneliness and indistinct threat; the time encompasses the (silenced) troubles of the postwar and post-1956 periods, the consolidated placidity
of the 1970s-80s, up to the years after the regime change when resurfacing neonationalism and neofascism brought out the complicit continuities in power.
Takács’s stories, just like her poetry, belong to the most intense and unique writings of melancholy in our times.

Product details
ISBN 978 963 1425 60 4
2007, hard cover with jacket
200 pages, 123 × 184 mm
2490 HUF

English excerpts and detailed synopsis available
detailed synopsis available

Novel

In Iván Sándor’s new novel, large masses of people are forced to abandon their homes in various parts of Europe. We are in the continent’s sixteenth-century, in the years before the Thirty Years’ War, with Spaniards, Germans, Flemings, Catholics and Protestants maiming and murdering each other on a daily basis. Two young men, Thomas and Jensen, and a girl, Eliz, leave their home in Leiden, for different reasons. Their fates intersect, and they join a troupe of actors as they journey through the war-torn continent. As we accompany them and witness their day-to-day struggle for survival, making difficult choices in inhuman circumstances and trying to come to terms with unspeakable suffering, we come away with lessons that may be distant in space and time but which certainly speak to us today. The Seventh Day is a beautiful novel written in a melancholic vein, which in the words of the critic Zsolt Kácsor is reminiscent of the sound of the shofar: “a long-drawn-out, cruelly painful cry of agony.”

“I do not write historical novels. I seek out recurring human situations, snares and ways of surviving amid the continuity of history. The stories in The Seventh Day could have taken place not only in the sixteenth century, when the novel is set, but equally in antiquity, or in the twenty-first century. The reason I put my characters into the sixteenth century is that world of the time may well be familiar to readers today: wars, hate-mongering, mass migration, religious conflict: a world made of iron. It is an era where I feel at home.”

It is a long way from remembering to forgetting and even longer from forgetting to remembering

Product details
ISBN: 9789631436747
2018, hard cover with jacket
256 pages, 130 × 197 mm
3299 HUF

Iván Sándor

Novel

Szilasi’s novel narrates the story of the author’s battle with a brain tumor, which started with him losing consciousness during a class he was teaching at the university. As he tries to come to terms with this harrowing experience, he pieces together the various aspects of his life. Constructed with surgical precision, Luther’s Dogs is made up of twelve main chapters divided into subchapters, bookended with a short preface and a coda. In the first few chapters, which resemble an investigative report, Szilasi attempts to reconstitute the 48 hours he lost during his epileptic seizure, scraping together whatever information he can from the people closest to him. He goes on to give an account of his operation, the oncological treatment that follows, and then his convalescence. From time to time there are lyrical or dreamlike interludes – memories of special moments, stories and incidents that resonate profoundly, as well as family memories from the war, such as his godparents’ witnessing of the bombing of Dresden. The novel ends with something that amounts to a miracle: not only is he cured but he and his girlfriend are expecting a new baby.
Szilasi charts the side effects of his illness, including the traumatic loss of his ability to read and write, or to understand his own texts, and the loss of creativity and concentration particularly frightening for a writer and scholar. There are shockingly candid accounts of his fits of anger and precise, unsparing descriptions of bodily processes, from chronic constipation to the effects of his medications.

“Luther gave up traveling aged about 50. Thereafter he would meet those dear to him, some 50 men in all, at home and let his wife, the ex-nun Katharina von Bora, cater for them.  They ate and drank, while some noted down his Table Talk. Mutthead lurked under the tables.  It would stare in silence and without moving, watching the pieces of meat as they made their way around.  Luther paid his dog no attention.
But once he said: Look, this here is prayer itself. It is silent, it is motionless, it is filled with longing. This is what the title of my book alludes to, because it suddenly dawned on me that although I was a believer, here, amidst this great affliction, I was not praying.  There was no prayer.  Ultimately, it was to this question that my book tried to provide an answer, but perhaps the question remains, in any case, worthwhile.  Making it remain worthwhile, that was what I was trying to do.” László Szilasi

“The topic is the body, which may leave us unexpectedly and radically in the lurch, only to make us, nevertheless, cling to it in the end with quite remarkable determination.  The topic is the loss of awareness, the imperceptible nature of time, the impossibility of being cured ending with the wondrousness of the ‘and yet’.  The topic is the heart-rending falling apart of a family, and the creation of a family anew. The topic is the past of the family, personal history, the fate of parents and grandparents, the traumas of the twentieth century, of times of war and peace, of ways of surviving, particularly poverty; his spare, restrained, tensely pulsating lines disclose these matters in all their detail, not least by exploiting the genre of the confessio.  Savor the words of the ominously glorious title, Luther’s Dogs.
At last: a novel that succeeds in redeeming life.” László Darvasi

A must-read for all those who still expect literature to give them something memorable, a serious, decisive experience – something that helps us live our lives.” (Ákos Györffy)

Product details
ISBN: 9789631436778
2018, hard cover with jacket
288 pages, 125 × 197 mm
3499 HUF

Rights sold
Macedonian, Artkonekt

English excerpt available

László Szilasi

Novel

Libri Audience Award 2019
Over 10,000 copies sold

In 1990, a man crashes his car and dies close to Iowa City. In 2013, a young man wakes up in Budapest after a bitter row with his girlfriend and takes the train to his native town in the eastern part of the country. In 1986, a patient suffering from post-polio syndrome and lying in an iron lung asks his male nurse to record him narrating his life. Gradually, the pieces of the mosaic slowly come together in this slow-paced, beautiful and poignant book, the first novel from Dénes Krusovszky, one of the most significant poets of his generation.

The protagonist of the novel, Bálint Lente is a thirty-something journalist working for the online press, an intelligent guy who is nevertheless fairly slow on the uptake when it comes to the feelings of those around him – his girlfriend, his divorced mother, or his friend from high school. It is Bálint who tries to make sense of the story as it unfolds from fragmented pieces: a tape left in an abandoned nursing home, some rumours, a few scant words uttered by Bálint’s friend.

This is a coming-of-age story about the Y-generation in Hungary, trying to find their own life and identity amid frustrated hopes, resentment of their parents’ generation, the dark shadows cast by the terrible 20^th century, and the ideological and emotional chaos of the turn of the millennium. This is not only a novel about individual and collective memory, but also about personal freedom – about learning to live by coming to terms with our heritage, historical and personal, as well as with possible versions of ourselves that once looked attainable but which we will, however, never be.

“I fell in love with this book… I wish people would talk about it on the bus, in the sauna, at the university, in parliament, on the radio and on TV. Our country would be a much better place.” (Csaba Károlyi)

Product details
ISBN: 9789631436747
2018, hard cover with jacket
480 pages, 130 × 197 mm
3299 HUF

English and German excerpt available

Interview with Dénes Krusovszky and review on Those We Will Never Be on hlo.hu

Dénes Krusovszky