Category: Hungarian lit month 2026

Temptation by Jânos Székely

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Temptation by Jânos Szêkely

Hungarian fiction

Original title –  Kísértés

Translator -Mark Baczoni

Source – Personal copy

I rounded off this year’s Hungarian month with another long book from Hungary.  This took me a lot longer to get through than I had hoped, but it was written in 1949.  When Janos was living in America and had been a very successful screenwriter, first in the twenties in Berlin, he then headed to the US after being offered a screenwriting job by Ernst Lubitsch in Hollywood. He spent time there till he was caught up in the McCarthy trials and headed to Mexico. Then he returned to Hungary and East Berlin. The book follows a young boy through the interwar years.  The book is partly based on the writer’s own life. It was initially published under the pen name John Pen.

But first I have a confession to make. I was not in the way that grown-ups tend to think about these things, strictly speaking

faithful to Sárika.

I say in the way that grown-ups think about these things, because I in no way considered what I got up to with a maid called Borcsa while I was hopelessly in love with Sárika to be infidelity in any way. I, like most other children, considered physical and emotional love to be two completely separate things. I’d never felt any kind of physical desire or curiosity with Sárika, though I was much concerned with the mystery of those things at the time.

I lived among servant girls and worked alongside them all day long, and they were mostly young, lively peasant girls who, being unacquainted with the gems of the Hungarian film industry of the time, had no idea what a decent, socially respectable Hungarian peasant girl was meant to be like. They simply were Hungarian peasant girls, who said what they thought, and what they actually thought why deny it? didn’t tend to appear much in the aforementioned cinematic masterpieces.

The girls treated me like a newborn kitten whose eyes have not yet opened. They talked freely in front of me, especially of things supremely suited to unsettling a prepubescent boy.

As he grews up this changes

I think one of the literary styles that Middle Europe is best at producing is the Bildungsroman, a coming-of-age tale. Bela, a young Orphan abandon by his mother. So when raised in absolute poverty by his guardians. He struggles and then turns to stealing. This happens not long after his mother returned. So she takes Bela to Budapest, where she has a job in a laundry. Bela ius is a bit of a wide boy; he leaps off the page, a sort of cheeky lad that people either love or hate. He gets jobs in the hotel, a grand place, and he sees the world of grandeur at close quarters, but all this is happening at the same time as Fascism is rising all around him and in Europe. We see a young boy growing into a man, discovering a woman, and all this as the country heads toward what would be World War II.  The book’s style is a series of small episodes from Bela’s life.

I sneaked into the gymnasium, decorated for the festive occasion, like a beggar afraid of getting barked at by the dogs. Primped-up ladies and gentlemen sat all around the speaker’s dais, and even the children had made an effort. When anyone glanced at me, I immediately blushed, because I thought they were looking at my ragged clothes. When the reed organ piped up for the prayers, I almost burst into tears. What use all those outstandings, I thought, when the notary’s son still has the finest clothes, though it was only out of pity that the Schoolmaster didn’t fail him.

The reed organ fell silent, and the speakers piped up instead. Speech followed sermon, sermon followed speech. The words spattered like autumn rain. I wasn’t listening. I wanted to cry.

This ut sounded very Dicken’s Me

It is hard, in the latter part of the book, not to imagine Bela working at the Grand Budapest Hotel.  The description of the grandeur he sees is similar to the film. But there is also a darker side to this book, the shadow of Fascism. In fact, the book is maybe more relevant at the moment, especially when you see how, through Bela’s eyes, how easy ot can be to nearly get caught by the fascist parties. Then there is a large dollop of Dickent he first part of the book could have been a dicken a orpahn boy poverty a cruel guardian a lost mother all tropes in Dickens work but that is where the comparison ends for Bela is a grey character not a dicken character no he is a more modern chartacter with his faults and problems we follow him through them in a world that is changing around him what will he do in the end ? I had hoped to read a couple more books this Hungarian lit month, but I have some left, so I will be running it again next February. Have you read this book? or ay other book that captures those late 1920s, early 1930s years of the rise of Fascism

The Parasite by Ferenc Barnás

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The Parasite by Ferenc Barnás

Hungarian fiction

Original title – Az élősködő

Translator – Paul Olchvary

Source – Personal copy

I started off the Hungarian lit month with this book; it caught my eye from the Seagull list of books from Hungary because it had a quote from Laszlo Krasznahorkai, ” Ferenc Barnás is a legend among those who know him,” now, when you get that from the most recent Nobel winner as a recommendation. Barnás seems to have won many of the major book prizes in his own country, and this was his debut novel, which came out in 1997 in Hungarian. I feel we get caught up in place-based trends when translating these days, and a powerhouse of literature like Hungary, with one of the strongest and most interesting literary scenes, is forgotten. Barnás has taught at times and, at other times, been a full-time writer. There are a couple of his other books out or due to be released by Seagull Books.

One of the men in the ward resembled a friend of mine who’d escaped from an occupational therapy clinic in the provinces. I always did like that ever-smiling wino. After absconding from that teetotalling institution, he took to hanging out at a train station, where his fellow imbibers would sometimes help him towards the public restroom to keep him from wetting his pants even more than he already had. One time I noticed him grinning knowingly at his half-witted chums, who, having been summoned to the train cars for a bit of hard labour to earn their bread or wine, were busily carrying dreadfully heavy sacks full of who-knows-what back and forth for some no doubt noble purpose. No, he wasn’t such a fool atter all. While the others toiled away, he went about not so discreetly sampling fruit brandy he’d acquired for a modest sum from someone’s illicit distillery.

His viewing other people in the hospital as a child

The narrator of this book is unknown. We follow him from late childhood to adulthood. He is a strange character; he thrives on illness and a sort of Munchausen youth, though his body suffers from this constant need to be ill. But he feels safe as a patient; you feel it is almost his safety blanket against the world, a strange boy feeding on symptoms. But as the world is, boys become men, and he grows up and starts to be a man, having relationships, he also starts masturbating greatly. At some point, you are not sure if the encounters he claims to have are real or maybe a fever dream, sexual imagery for him to come tooo? , but even then, he has quirks; he has one-night stands, but then he gets haunted and wracked with dreams of what the previous night’s women are now doing.  But when he ends up with an older woman simply called L, but the initial silence of the dreams and nightmares that haunt his sex life ends, but then come back in a darker way.

Perhaps I should have placed an ad in the classifieds: ‘Seeking someone to beat sordidness of unknown origin out of me, every last bit of it. Perverts need not reply!’ Who knows, perhaps I would have happened upon a psychotic prison guard who specialized in exactly my sort of case! Why shouldn’t there be people out there who know not only torture inside-out but also psychology? | yearned for an applicant who could discern the nature of my imagination through my body’s agony. I would have been able to determine even from his mistakes whether he was really suited to the task. Even as I smiled at this childish escape fantasy of mine, I was virtually certain that people must have once lived who knew just how to go about exorcizing demons.

Seeking out people to suit his particular sexual needs

I loved this book. It had a little bit of Thomas Bernhard in it. The sheer sorrowful life of our narrator is very Bernhardian. But the voice comes across as very quirky at times, a tone and feel to the narrative I haven’t read in anything else, which makes it very interesting. But for me, Bartis, another Hungarian writer, his book Tranquillity is about a young man set in roughly the same time, although in many ways different; both are ways of looking at the child-parent relationship growing up in Socialist Hungary.  Another feeling for me was that our narrator grew up, his one-night stands were either real or just fever dreams from his sexual mind, and guilt of being the way he was, and that is why initially his relationship with L is so different.  This is what I love about much of the Hungarian fiction I have read: it is deep-thinking, and it requires readers to reflect on the characters. I will be in the historic Roman times in the next book for Hungarian lit month in a few days’ time. Have you read any books by Ferenc Barnás?

 

Make a note in Your Diary for Hungarian Lit month Feb 2026

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A couple of years ago, I did a Czech Lit month that was a success. I had thought of doing that again next year, but with the recent Nobel Prize win by László Krasznahorkai, I realised I hadn’t read enough books from Hungary this year; a mere 17 is a poor showing. Especially when I had a look at the list of Hungarian writers on Wikipedia. To find the depth of books that have come from Hungary over the years. I have the recent Peter Nadas memoir, Shimmering, on my TBR, along with two books by Andrea Tompa, Home and Omerta, plus a few books from Krasznahorakai to read and review. A real resource for this month is the Hungarian literature online. There are two good publishers bringing books out from Hungary, the first is Seagull Books, which has a Hungarian list edited by Krasznahorkai translator Ottilie Mulzet . Then, a publisher that has brought some lost gems to light is Contra Mundum Press. But there are also books from the likes of Pushkin Press, NYRB, and gems scattered through other publishers. I am planning to read shimmering details and the two Tompa books, and I hope to get a few other books from Seagull and Contra Mundum books I have my eye on the two vols of Prae. Do you have a favourite book from Hungary or a writer?