The New Hungarian Quarterly, 1992 (33. évfolyam, 127. szám)

BOOKS AND AUTHORS - Györffy Miklós: From Chapter to Novel (Ádám Bodor, László Krasznahorkai, Péter Lengyel)

Miklós Györffy From Chapter to Novel Ádám Bodor: Sinistra körzet (Sinistra District), Magvető, 1992, 158 pp; László Krasznahorkai: Az urgai fogoly (Prisoner in Urga), Széphalom Könyvműhely, 1992, 142 pp; Péter Lengyel: Holnap előtt (The Day Before Tomorrow), Jelenkor Irodalmi és Művészeti Kiadó, 1992, 211 pp. T he setting and subject of Ádám Bodor’s latest volume of prose is easy to locate and yet it cannot be found on any map. The setting is somewhere in the Carpathians, on the Rumanian side of the Rumanian-Ukrainian border, the text in­timates, but the best one can do is to seek a model for it under some different name. The text also provides footholds concern­ing the time, which is the present, or the recent past. However, there are no refer­ences that point to the political role and background of this region. It is a more or less closed territory, strictly controlled by the military or the police under a for­est commissioner, who commands the mountain riflemen and has been dis­patched from some distant, outlying place. Since Rumania in the recent past was a dictatorship ruled by Ceausescu, and with the knowledge that Ádám Bodor is a Transylvanian Hungarian whose previ­ous collection included a story of grue­some bizarre internment and exile* 1, there can be no doubt as to the reality and Miklós Györffy is NHQ’s regular revie­wer of new fiction. 1 “The Out-Station”, NHQ 101. See an­other story of the cycle, “Epidemic in Dobrin,” in NHQ 125. personal experience which was the inspi­ration. But this district of Sinistra is not a communist camp or penal settlement, but a literary fiction, a metaphorical prov­ince. As its name indicates, it is a dark and baleful region whose inhabitants live in a captivity that resembles some kind of self-imposed—or enforced—exile. “Chapters of a novel,” is the subtitle of Sinistra District, which consists of a cy­cle of fifteen stories, each of which can be read in its own right as well. Several have indeed been published separately. Placed side by side, however, they seem to make up a novel, with a beginning and end; the basic information on the district and its inhabitants though recurs chapter by chapter, in the form required by the independent life of the relevant story. Thus, for instance, some piece of infor­mation, already known, is reiterated about the narrator and one of the chief charac­ters—Andrej Bodor. He is both alter ego of the writer and of an anonymous any­body who, having arrived in the district, has cast off his former identity and wears his pseudonym Andrej Bodor as a dog­­tag. Nothing is known about his past and all we leam about his purpose in coming here is that he is looking for his foster son. Certain signs seem to indicate that the son is here in the district. He may have come here voluntarily, and he could Books & Authors 153

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