The Hungarian Quarterly, Summer 2009

In his 2007 novel, A complete tandori – is he completely nutZ, Tandori seems to be "taking stock of the main concerns of his novelistic oeuvre and summing up his problematic of selfhood, living and writing", concerns that are ubiquitous and inseparable in this writer's oeuvre. You can read an excerpt from the novel in this issue in Tim Wilkinson's translation, as well as four poems by Tandori, translated by Christopher Whyte.

Writer Zsolt Láng reviews books by Nándor Gion, András Cserna-Szabó and Noémi Kiss. The collected works of Nándor Gion (1941–2002), a writer from Vojvodina, Serbia, were started in the year of his death, and two volumes, containing a total of eight novels, have already been published. This issue of The Hungarian Quarterly features a long excerpt from the first novel in the collection, Soldier-with-Flower (trans. Tim Wilkinson), "a totally unnostalgic portrait of life in the Monarchy (the story opens in 1898).

Serbs, Hungarians and ethnic Germans live in separate districts of a large village, not mixing and yet unavoidably belonging together." This novel, as Láng notes, tells about "a world where reality is swifter than imagination."

András-Cserna Szabó (b. 1974) is a "witty, light-hearted, cooly ironic and highly imaginative storyteller", whose sixth book, a short-story collection entitled Snogshop was published last year. In these stories, Láng writes, "everything is grotesque" – but not satirical or frivolous; this is a grotesque of a "cooler, less serious, more alcohol-fuelled type".

Noémi Kiss (b. 1974) is "fond of launching into unknown territory... in her stories, adventurous and strange in scale, or even stranger in perspective". Sex and murder in a Berlin bar, a sad love affair between an Eastern European chorus girl and a Turkish lad, a meditation over why and how a woman writes, or a paraphrase of a tale by E.T.A. Hoffman – the stories in Trans are all variations on the theme of writing and lovemaking, or writing as lovemaking.

The table of contents as well as excerpts from the articles and some articles in full are available online at hungarianquarterly.com."

Source: Hungarian Literature Online