Short stories
If we want to know what will remain when we are gone, we first have to learn who we are. The stories of Boundary are all based on personal memories: whether their topic is the author’s childhood and adolescence in Cluj, Romania; her love and marriage in Budapest; or trips to Cairo, Malta or Tibet, they all investigate the boundaries of the individual, the joys and embarrassment of a woman facing her own story, as well as the history of the time and place she inhabits.
Balancing sense and sensibility, identification and distancing, freedom and helplessness, prose and poetry, Anna T. Szabó’s book is pushing the boundaries of effability. Travelling in space and time, encountering witches and angels, feeling the pain of intimacy and strangeness, the narrator always returns to her own hard-won, hard-to-pin-down identity. Some of the stories are of an anecdotal nature, others are flash fiction pieces about the body, about language, anger and pain, with a couple of stories in the end of the volume about the author’s aunt. These latter paint a tender picture of a spirited lady in communist Budapest who is trying to maintain the accoutrements of a middle-class life, and who dies poor and forlorn.
Anna T. Szabó, who has been known as an eminent lyrical poet since her debut in the 1990s, surprised her readers in her first prose volume, Crash Test, with her passion, wildness and anger. The stories of Boundary have the individual and the larger family (rather than the relationship between men and women) in their focus, and the narrator’s passion mingles with some sadness.
A book which tries to find a home in the world but leaves the window open to the sky
It was thirty years ago that we crossed the border; it was December. We packed up our entire life, made lists of everything, of the milk teeth and photographs we carefully kept in boxes, but at least we didn’t have to leave behind everything, as a container-load of furniture and stuff, pictures and books, came after us. What we didn’t manage to cram in, we lost all trace of. My childhood disappeared overnight. The journey by train remains a numbing void, a fog smelling of crows, a long, slow trundle into the unknown. I’ve no memory of it, except for the tang of giddiness, because crossing the border was like hurtling across a bridge spanning an abyss.”
Product details
ISBN 978 963 14 3682 2
2018, hard cover with jacket
200 pages, 123 × 184 mm
2999 HUF
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.
Is one supposed to be overjoyed if the best executioner in the country moves in next door? How does a mother feel if she is only allowed to meet her child for breastfeeding – a child who lives with the blind father? Is life with a tailor’s dummy preferable to life with flesh-and-blood people? Reading Edina Szvoren’s latest stories about inadequate relationships, absurd secrets, unspeakable pain and intense longing, the reader is overcome simultaneously by dread, sympathy, and surprise. Hopelessly at odds with our parents and children, longing to be with, or away from, our partners, we still somehow manage to get on in the world. We are foreigners in our own stories, yet this is where we have to set up home. Will we ever get used to all this actually fitting together? Edina Szvoren’s stories show the claustrophobic familiarity of our relationships, with sparks of a dark humour and hints of the absurd.
Praised as one of the most important Hungarian books of the last decades, On Intimate Terms is the first volume by Edina Szvoren, the most compelling short story writer in Hungary today. These powerful and weird stories chart human relations with rare sensitivity. Szvoren maps out the themes of family traumas, the bleak holidays of childhood, the lack of a father, and loneliness in her own peculiar way. Each sentence by Szvoren creates a world that is unmistakeably hers. She writes about bodies, distances and alienation. Yet we read about souls, closeness and identity. This is what Szvoren’s great and authentic performance consists in. Her language is not unadorned yet it is lean. Her narrative optic changes perspectives from one moment to another. Extreme long shots turn into extreme closeups, to use film terminology.
The hero of this novel, Aimé Billion, is a real outsider who feels as a stranger not only in Africa or Europe, but even in his own body. Of Yoruba, Vietnamese and French descent, he is considered a white man by Africans, and an African by white people. Aimé spends the first thirty-eight years of his life in Benin, where he works as a nursing assistant. He then moves to Norway, a country where even neighbours are strangers to each other. Yet it is there that he finds happiness in an extraordinary love relationship. From traditional voodoo practices to the intricacies of life in the most affluent welfare society, Aimé charts everything with the same affability and curiosity. Happy North is a novel in which magic realism meets ‘plain’ realism to bring strange worlds to the reader and make them heart-achingly familiar.
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