Short stories
In Grecsó’s new collection, many of the stories are born of the tension and confusion resulting from the meeting of two worlds. In some of the stories, these two worlds are the city and the village; in others, it is the present and the past. And, importantly, there is the world of the healthy and that of the sick. The severe illness from which the author has only recently recovered is a theme or motif in many of the stories.
The first part of the book consists of traditional ‘long’ short stories, where the point of departure is a scene or a place in the present which leads the narrator to recount some event in the past – in the 30s or 50s of the last century – with repercussions in the present. The stories in the second part, very personal in tone, are all about one man’s life at various points in time; those in the third are interrelated in the sense that the minor characters in one turn up as protagonists in others; and several of those in the fourth and final section are experiments in writing about happiness.
In narratives which oscillate between fiction, autofiction and autobiography, the author tells of village houses that are left half-completed, mere caricatures of their owners’ towering ambitions, and of places in Budapest that are missing from the tourist guidebooks, or that have already disappeared – like former factories replaced by sprawling housing estates. As for his characters, they come from all walks of life: we get glimpses into the lives of editors of literary magazines, unemployed Gypsy women, taxi drivers and shop assistants. Grecsó’s characters feel painfully alone in the crowd, yet this overwhelming loneliness is offset by the reader’s sense that our fates are intertwined, even if we are unaware of the fact, or indeed resist it. Grecsó loves and understands his characters, and there is in his stories an undercurrent of hopefulness, in spite of disappointments and tragedies.
Product details
ISBN 978 963 1441 55 0
2022, hard cover with jacket
288 pages, 125×280 mm
3999 HUF
Born in Budapest in 1927, Szilárd Rubin lost his mother at the age of ten. His father and other members of his family died by violence. Rubin’s first book, Playing Chicken was published in 1963. Although it went against the expectations of socialist realism, some of his contemporaries immediately realized its value, with writer Miklós Szentkuthy calling the book a “true-blooded, modern Werther.” Playing Chicken was rediscovered in the 1990s. Rubin wrote five books, two of which earned him a late, but worldwide recognition: his unique and concise writing, mixing sentimentality with cruel self-examination has been compared to works of Marcel Proust, William Faulkner and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Rubin died in 2010 in Tapolca, Hungary after a long illness.
How does a woman arrive at the point of killing her husband? Is her failure due to her body, her marriage or history? Why does she want a child at all costs? And why does society stigmatize her if she doesn’t manage to have one?
Iván Sándor is a writer, essayist and playwright born in 1930. Laureate of the Attila József Prize (1985), the Sándor Márai Prize (2000) and the Pro Literatura Prize (2001), among others, he has written forty books to date. Several of his books were published in foreign languages; Követés (Legacy) has appeared in English, French and German.
An extraordinary, upsetting and profoundly honest story about communist Romania in the 1980s, this book is the memoir of a young girl and a witness account of a dark era. She is only 18, and she wants to become a ballet dancer. As Romanian citizens of Hungarian nationality, her family has a plan: she enters into a sham marriage with a Hungarian, and her parents will soon follow her to Hungary and relative freedom. Due to an unexpected turn of events, her parents make it to Hungary first, and she stays in Romania all on her own, confronted with Ceauşescu’s state bureaucracy. This, then, will be her life setting for the following year when some of the most important events of her young life are about to take place: her ballet exam, her final year in secondary school. And the effective liquidation of all their former life in Romania.
Magvető Rights 
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