Author: Gaspar Buzasi

Thirteen stories

Winner of the Libri Literary Prize 2019

In Edina Szvoren’s fourth short story collection, which carries the deceptive title My Poems, several characters are engaged in writing: stepping outside reality in a way that still keeps them part of it. The poems of one female character are accepted for publication by a major daily newspaper, which changes her relationship with her father, who now looks at her daughter through totally different eyes. A male character keeps track of his daily life with his wife by filling up notebooks. Szvoren’s “absurd realist” world abounds in secrets and obsessions. The female character of the story entitled “Let Me Tell You Something About My Life” has served time for bestiality. The mother of the narrator of one story becomes so infatuated with her tenant that they conspire to lock up the narrator in a bedlinen drawer, while in another story a woman is obsessed with a physics teacher’s YouTube videos. The narrator of “Visitors,” who is responsible for a car accident, is repeatedly tormented by imaginary prison inmates even though she has been acquitted.

Szvoren, who is intrigued by “the prosaic character of the sublime and the poetic character of the trivial”, chronicles the “complex, morose” details of the working hours of employees in an office block (“I’ve Been Through This, This Has Happened Before”), the pros and cons of owning a trailer (“The Daughter of the Thief-God Lives in Elek”). As she says about the creative process: “One unimportant thing leads me to another, that to a third, and I end up working with the fourth – that’s the way it goes. It seems that when I write I am not trying to nail something down… but to re-create something from the building blocks of reality, creating these Lego structures at random.”

It is not only the formal rigour of her sentences, their bone-chilling perfection, that makes Edina Szvoren’s new volume of stories worth savouring.  Her unsparing psychological sensitivity and all-penetrating vision reach simultaneously into the very depths of human beings and into their relationships with each other, while being capable of making one feel absolutely anything, even if that should happen to be banal.”  (Tibor Noé Kiss)

Review on hlo.hu

Edina Szvoren

Product details
ISBN: 9789631436631
2018, hard cover with jacket
212 pages, 120 × 190 mm
3299 HUF

Rights sold
Serbian, Darma Books

European Union Prize for Literature 2019

Réka Mán-Várhegyi’s novel paints a vivid picture of the life of young academics in Hungary at the beginning of the 21^st century. Enikő, a thirty-something feminist sociologist returns to Budapest from New York, brimming with research plans. Armed with state-of-the-art research methods and theories, she leaves her husband, an American performance artist, in order to write a “real self-help book” entitled The Misery of Hungarians. Yet she finds herself struggling with writer’s block. Tamás Bogdán, a star lecturer at the university, a first-generation intellectual, is in a relationship with Enikő as well as with Réka, a student of them both. Réka, who is writing a novel, comes from a dystopian communist-style housing estate, a breeding-ground for neo-Nazi ideologies, which happens to be the subject of Bogdán’s research. The novel ends in Florence, with Enikő and another Hungarian sociologist bathing in the sea after giving their papers at a conference on the poverty and inequality stemming from globalization.

Magnet Hill is much more than a campus novel: through the struggle of the main characters, we glimpse several layers of contemporary Hungarian society, each with their particular milieu, history, prejudices and challenges, from leftist liberal intellectuals and aristocratic families to first-generation intellectuals from the provinces, as well as marginalized groups. This eminently readable, often hilariously funny novel touches upon a number of questions, ranging from female identity to the gaps between theory and practice as well as between the world as seen from the West and as viewed from Hungary.

“If you bring up Eastern Europe at these kinds of events, it can feel as if you’re talking about the moon, except that these days Eastern Europe is no longer of the slightest interest to anyone.”
“Oh, come now, that’s surely putting it far too strongly,” says Regina.
Enikő shrugs.

Product details
ISBN: 9789631436600
2018, flexicover
388 pages, 123 × 18 mm
3499 HUF

Rights sold
Albanian, Toena
Bulgarian, Colibri
Czech, Větrné mlýny
Croatian, VBZ
Italian, Spider and Fish
Macedonian, Artkonekt
Polish, Biuro Literackie
Serbian, Heliks
Slovenian, Mladinska knjiga

English excerpt available

Review on Magnet Hill on hlo.hu
Interview with the author on hlo.hu

Réka Mán-Várhegyi

Vera takes place in the city of Szeged, in 1980, against the backdrop of the stuffy world of the final, weary decade of socialism with its overwhelming lies, corruption and nepotism.

Vera is an eleven-year-old girl, and her life seems perfectly secure: she excels at school and at horse riding, and has loving parents. But in a matter of weeks, her life
is turned upside down. One event leads to another in a chain reaction, too fast for Vera to understand them and her own reactions to them. How did her best friend become her greatest, sworn enemy? Why is it so exciting yet frightening to spend time with the new arrival, Józef, the rowdy Polish boy? And why do adults have secrets, sometimes dirty, shameful and painful ones, if they insist on Vera telling the truth?

In the course of these few boisterous weeks, Vera finds herself breaking rules despite herself—she plays truant, steals and lies. She learns that nobody around her is who she thought they were: she herself is an adopted child, her adoptive father’s parents had died, and her best friend’s father is her adopted father’s brother—in a way.

Besides Vera’s internal turmoil, the readers of this finely wrought novel will also get a glimpse into the pain of adults, attenuated by the fact that they are seen through the filter of a child. As we follow events through Vera’s consciousness, we gradually understand how little sense we adults can make of people and things, even though we cannot be as innocently honest and emotional about them as a child.

45,000 copies sold

Product details
978 963 14 3829 1
2019, hard cover with jacket
336 pages, 125×197 mm
3699 HUF

Complete English text available

If women of yore who had lived their lives in the shadows of men spoke up and told their stories, what would they say? The six stories in this book span almost five hundred years and two continents. These ‘invisible stories’ are the monologues of six Jewish women whose point of view had been all but hidden beyond the stories in which they were merely supporting actors.

Birnbaum, a cultural historian, reveals the feelings and ideas of these women through fictitious diaries, letters and confessions. Five of them are well-known historical figures or characters in famous works of art: Gilda Molcho from Verdi’s Rigoletto; Reyna, daughter of Gracia Mendes, the famed Renaissance banker; Fromet, wife of the revered philosopher Moses Mendelssohn; Rebecca Gratz, one of the founders of several Jewish Aid Societies in America in the 19th century; or Léda, the lover and muse of Endre Ady, one of the most important Hungarian poets. The sixth woman, the narrator of “Mici’s Playbook,” tells the story of a typical Jewish Hungarian woman in the 20th century: persecution, survival and starting anew in the New World. This is the longest and most poignant story in which an elegant old woman, victim of a street attack, is lying in a vegetative state – or so she pretends to the people visiting her in the hospital. In fact, she hears and sees everything, and has her own, often deprecating, opinion of all those around her, especially her own daughter.

Marianna D. Birnbaum’s ‘untold stories,’ written in a dynamic prose that has the feel of immediacy, offer realities behind the reality well known from textbooks. They provide valuable, sometimes funny, sometimes heartrending footnotes to mainstream cultural history.

If women of yore who had lived their lives in the shadows of men spoke up and told their stories, what would they say?

Product details
ISBN 978 963 1437 24 9
2018, hard cover with jacket
160 pages, 110×180 mm
2990 HUF

Excerpt on hlo.hu

Complete English translation available

Marianna D. Birnbaum

A literary and cultural historian of Hungarian origin, Marianna D. Birnbaum is a Research Professor of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and frequent visiting professor and examiner of the CEU, Budapest. In her research, Birnbaum focuses on the arts and cultures dominating Renaissance and modern Central Europe and on the social function and cultural contributions of Jews in Europe, and in the Ottoman Empire, after 1492. Her works include The Long Journey of Gracia Mendes (CEU Press, 2003, originally published in English, also published in Turkish, Portuguese, Hungarian and Croatian); Esterházy, Konrád, Spiró Jeruzsálemben (Magvető, 2010, published in German by Nischen Verlag, 2010); Az évek iszkolása. Esterházy Péter és Marianna D. Birnbaum beszélget (Magvető, 2015, published in German by Hanser Verlag, 2017); Esterházy-kalauz. Marianna D. Birnbaum beszélget Esterházy Péterrel (Magvető, 1991, revised and extended edition: A próza iskolája, Magvető, 2017); Láthatatlan történetek (Magvető, 2018).

Untold Tales of Love and Shame