Novel
Besides being the story of a brave coming out in 1990s Hungary, Incognito is a remarkable debut of a promising writer, a novel which traces the inner development of an individual.
Incognito is a gripping account of how a young boy, a keen soccer-player who lives in the outskirts of Budapest discovers the stranger – the Other – in his own personality and body. The novel tells the story of how Tibor finds his alter ego, Noémi, in himself, and how he manages to accept, and make people around him accept, this newly-found identity. Besides being the story of a brave coming out in 1990s Hungary, Incognito is a remarkable debut of a promising writer, a novel which traces the inner development of an individual. Tibor Noé Kiss has found a melancholy rhythm, a sensitive and gentle yet powerful prose, and an original perspective to match his topic, the growth of a young man, and the woman in him.
While Incognito is specifically about the life of a transgender person in society, his interactions and sexuality, the temptation of suicide, the desire to be known and loved, and the painful awareness of the impossibility of it, it is also an account of the pain and solitude of our human condition, which happens to be concentrated here in the protagonist’s gender insecurity.
I’m a transvestite, there’s nothing special about this. That is what I should answer when they ask me, but they don’t ask me even though they would love to ask me, and I would love to answer, too… I want to make it clear. I’m a transvestite, but not in that sense. There is nothing special about this. I’m a transvestite, but not that kind.”
I think nobody has ever crossed that pedestrian bridge in a woman’s suit. Only me. That’s what I call a unique experience.”
Product details
ISBN 978 963 1434 80 4
2016, hard cover with jacket
148 pages, 125×197 mm
2690 HUF
Rights sold
English, New Europe Books
Finnish, Kustantamo
Polish, Książkowe Klimaty
Slovenian, Lambda
English and French excerpts available
The inclination to travel: to set off to faraway lands, to leave behind the familiar world, one’s home – only to look for what is familiar in the place that attracted us precisely because of its strangeness and otherness. Rather than visiting glamorous cities, Noémi Kiss visits the peripheries of Eastern Europe: Bukovina, Backa and Galicia. As she is open-minded enough to allow for otherness, she returns from her trips with more than just herself. Her Eastern Europe is sensitive, diverse, full of contradictions and enduring. It is her attention that sets off the historical lustre of shabby places, opening larger vistas than the present state of dilapidation and scarcity. And it is her openness that makes us believe that Ukraine is home not only to the most beautiful and the ugliest woman in the world but the middle of the world as well.
What does it mean to give birth, and how does it feel to be born? This exquisite book by Noémi Kiss is subtitled ‘foetal prose.’ A rhythmic succession of narratives, monologues, notes and meditations describes the whole process of birth, from artificial insemination to labour, ending with the first birthday of the twins. Some of the stories are told from the perspective of the mother, others from that of the twins. Birth is present in this book as a physiological reality and spiritual miracle, with its various stages of hoping, pain and helplessness, and the hard-earned moments when mother and child manage to find a common language. As a result of a cosmic yet banal process, ‘I’ and ‘you’ merge into ‘we.’ Confronting a number of taboos about pregnancy and child-rearing, the book of Noémi Kiss is liberating reading.
Oravecz’s novel tells the story of Steve Arvai, the son of Hungarian farmers who had emigrated to America around the turn of the 20th century. A native of California, Steve loses his job during the Great Depression of the 1930s, and decides to try his luck in Hungary, his parents’ old country. Though initially Steve’s American know-how and free spirit help him become a successful farmer in Hungary, with the passage of time, moving to the old country turns out to have been a mistake: though Steve’s farm manages to survive the hardships of the war economy of the 1940s, it is dealt a fatal blow by the communist regime that follows. The novel ends with Steve and his family crossing the Hungary-Austria border after the Russian invasion that followed the 1956 revolution.
Around the turn of the century, masses of poor Hungarians set off to America with the hope of making a fortune in the New World. István Árvai, his wife and two children are among them. They leave Hungary with the intention to make some money, then return and buy some land. However, the world they had left behind will be lost forever, ravaged by World War I and the Treaty of Trianon which left Hungary with roughly one-third of its pre-war territory and two-thirds of its population. Thus, István Árvai and his family (like Oravecz’s grandparents) eventually decide not to return to their homeland. Imre Oravecz spent years in the US in the 1970s, travelling back and forth between the US and Hungary, before eventually returning to settle in his native village, Szajla. He did extensive research about the life of Hungarian communities of workers on oil rigs in Toledo, Ohio and Southern California to produce this pageturner of a novel which narrates the life of these unsung people, hovering between homesickness and the desire to make a new home in the New World.
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