Author: magvetorights

Novel

Spring Collection by one of Hungary’s most renowned authors, György Spiró, is a Kafkaesque novel about an ordinary man in the Hungary of the 1950s, a ‘good communist’, an idealist who believes in the Party, suddenly finding himself the target of ridiculous accusations which nonetheless and gradually almost ruin his whole life in this era of dictatorship. Spiró’s genius consists in translating the essence of a dictatorial regime into a perfectly normal, everyday story. The reader, together with the Everyman protagonist of the novel, spirals helplessly deeper and deeper downwards, drawn in by the uncompassionate, relentless entity that is the dictatorial regime of the 1950s in Hungary. Together with the protagonist, we experience, even if we do not necessarily understand the absurd logic of, the mechanisms of absolute power. It is a frightening representation of how utterly incidental absolute power can be in crushing the individual, without even noticing it.

A Kafkaesque novel on absolute power and the individual

Product details
ISBN 978 963 1428 41 4
2010, hard cover with jacket
288 pages, 134×185 mm
2990 HUF

Rights sold
Spanish, Acantilado
Catalan, Quaderns Crema
Italian, Guanda
Finnish, Avain
German, Nischen Verlag
Slovak, Kalligram
Bulgarian, Gutenberg Publishing
Turkish, Dedalus Publishing
Serbian, Sezam Book
French, Galaade Éditions
Polish, Czytelnik

English and French excerpts, complete German, Slovak, Italian, Spanish and Polish translations available

György Spiró

Novel

Angelus Prize (Poland) for Best Eastern European novel, 2010

The characters in this novel, taking place in the mid-19th century, are all historical figures. They include the greatest Polish poets, Mickiewicz and Słowacki, who founded a strange sect in Paris, together with a few dozens of their compatriots. These Polish emigrants believed that Andrzej Towiański, a Pole who arrived in Paris from the Russian Empire, is none other but Jesus Christ incarnate, who came down to the earth again in order to write the Newest Testament with his own life, and facilitate a new Redemption, led by the Polish people. The novel, which narrates the rise and fall of the sect, has two protagonists: one is the prophetic poet, Adam Mickiewicz, the other is a certain Gerson Ram, son of a Jewish printer who rebels against his father and his religion, and becomes a follower of Towiański in Vilna (then a Polish city occupied by the Russians). Towiański’s sect was at the same time an archaic and a very modern organization, the origins of which can be traced back to centuries of European (German and French) mysticism, and which also anticipated 20th and 21st century ideas. It is not by chance that some Italian members of the sects joined the Fascist movement. Towiański himself lived to a very old age, and his followers supported him financially until his death. Starting with the defeat of the Polish uprising, the story follows the Polish refugees through German states to Paris. We spend some time in Rome and Jerusalem, then take part in the Paris revolution of 1848, following Mickiewicz’s legion to Italy, and ending our journey in the company of Poles and Russians in Istanbul, in 1855. Messiahs has had several Hungarian editions, and its Polish translation received the prestigious Angelus Prize in Wrocław, awarded to the best Eastern European novel of the year in 2010.

 “What happens if we mix Dostoyevsky with Sterne?

A tragicomedy about the Towiański sect by a Hungarian author.” (Juliusz Kurkiewicz)

Product details
ISBN 978 963 14 2552 9
2007, hard cover with jacket
648 pages, 145×225 mm
3990 HUF

Rights sold
Polish, WAB

German excerpts and complete Polish text available

György Spiró

Novel

Diavolina, a housemaid who rose to be a physician, worked as a servant for Maxim Gorky, his wives, lovers, and the crowds of hangers-on who constantly swarmed around the world-famous Russian author. She then became his nurse and his last love. In Diavolina, György Spiró conjures the world of Czarist Russia in its final years and the Soviet Union in its first decades – including the Great Purge of the 1930s – from the perspective of this shrewd and discerning woman, including the disturbing parallels between the new autocracy and the old: revolutions, intrigues and, above all, untold numbers of dead.

In 1921, Lenin drove Gorky out of his homeland. Gorky settled on the island of Capri in Italy. Mussolini, who had just come to power, approved his request for a residence permit, saying that a man who was writing his memoirs could hardly pose a threat. Seven years later Stalin compelled the ailing writer to return to the Soviet Union and immediately put him to work. Gorky, who was dangerously ill, attempted both to defy and fulfil expectations. Trusting in his own stature and strength of character, he sought to outwit the regime. He divided his time between, on the one hand, writing Stalinist eulogies and fulminating against the enemies of the regime, and, on the other writing letters, organizing meetings and trying to convince party leaders to release people from prison. As Diavolina notes maliciously, “five people were rescued, five hundred were arrested, five thousand were executed – this was the rate under Lenin as well as under Stalin.”

Every character in this novel is based on a historical figure, and even the most astonishing stories in it are true. As we read, we feel we are among the ever-changing circles of guests – artists, writers, intellectuals, scoundrels, and murderers – who over the decades frequented Gorky’s many homes.

Communism is the dogma of small-minded seekers after vengeance, the dictatorship of the talentless, Aleksei kept saying. Brainless blackguards came streaming out of the woodwork and liquidated everyone more decent than themselves and they called that revolution. Apart from being editor-in-chief of several periodicals and a series of books, Aleksei saved 276 people from execution; a few years later a third of them were executed anyway.”

Gorky’s last ten years during the Great Purge of the Stalinist 1930s

Product details
ISBN 978 963 1432 49 7
2015, hard cover with jacket
208 pages, 123 × 184 mm
2990 HUF

Rights sold
French, Actes Sud
Polish, Czytelnik
Russian, Corpus

English excerpts available

György Spiró

A satirical tale

A dystopian adventure story that takes place in the past and in the future, Stone Frog is a historical satire about the frailty, stupidity and helplessness of human beings. The main character, Kálmánka is a half-wit who is suddenly elected head of his native village. From that moment on, his life is shaped by others: first the king, Three Percent Charlie, ruler of Kálmánka’s homeland, a cross between a communist regime and a feudal kingdom; then the secret services of various other powers including the UN, the US and Russia, and whoever has decided to use him for their own purposes. Kálmánka travels around the world, sees the past and the future, and spends stints in various prisons without understanding anything that is happening to him and around him. At a certain point, he falls from the future into the past, and finds himself in front of the yellow building of a famous (and now abandoned) psychiatric hospital in Budapest, in the company of people who had been deported during the war and others who returned from the Soviet Union, engaged in a chilling and hilarious debate which sheds light on various events of 20^th century Hungarian history. Finally, Kálmánka arrives in a post-apocalyptic land populated with mutant creatures – his own native village.

Spiró’s signature grotesque realist style illuminates the nooks and crannies of the human animal. The carnivalesque world of Stone Frog is full of fairy-tale elements, yet too often, the smile on the reader’s face turns into a grimace when she realizes that in fact, this world is all too similar to our own.

Voltaire’s Candide in 21^st century Hungary

Product details
ISBN 978 963 1435 19 1
2017, hard cover with jacket
248 pages, 123 × 184 mm
3499 HUF

György Spiró

Short stories

This is the first work in prose from a remarkable poet. It contains fifteen short stories, each having a subtitle containing the expression line/bar. The narrator of the stories is either a young girl or a young woman, depending on the reader’s interpretation of each story, and some may see her as the same person all the way through. However, every action is seen from a woman’s point of view: childhood acquaintances, school camps, love, children, deceit, and journeys set against the backdrop of the ’socialist’ era towards its close.

Product details
ISBN 978 963 1425 12 3
2006, hard cover with jacket
188 pages, 123×184 mm
2490 HUF

Rights sold
English, Jantar
French, Gallimard
German, Berlin Verlag
Spanish, El Nadir
Bulgarian, Ergo
Czech, Fra
Czech, Tympanum (audio book)
Finnish, Avain
Serbian, B92
Polish, Książkowe Klimaty
Arabic, NCCAL Kuwait

English and Italian excerpts, complete German and French text available