Category: Arts and Letters

PENDRAGONIA – IN MEMORIAM KLÁRI SZERB

PENDRAGONIA1(IN MEMORIAM KLÁRI SZERB)2 This story within a story is told as it happened, without frills and as close to the facts as the writer’s memory allows given the distance of scores of years. When Klári Szerb arrived in London and László Cs. Szabó3 called me to meet her, I

FERENC PULSZKY

One of the most interesting figures of Hungary’s 19th century, Ferenc Pulszky was born in Eperjes on 17 September 1814 and died on 9 September 1897 in Budapest. He was a politician, a writer and a scholar: a man of multiple talents and of encyclopaedic knowledge. Eperjes in the 19th

NOTES TO ‘THE PASSION AT RAVENSBRÜCK’

One steps clear of the others, stands in a block of silence, still. The prison garb, the convict’s scalp blink like an old film-reel. Fearful to be a self alone: the pores are visible, with everything around so huge and everything so small. And that was it. As for the

REMBRANDT AND THE DUTCH GOLDEN AGE – EXHIBITION AT THE MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS

In 2006, the Budapest Museum of Fine Arts ran an exhibition titled El Greco, Velázquez, Goya: Five Centuries of Spanish Masterpieces, as the first instalment in a series designed to offer a comprehensive insight into some of the grand periods and schools of European painting, building on the core pieces

ON COMPANION ANIMALS IN KRASZNAHORKAI

I. László Krasznahorkai has one main method in his fiction: he reduces the scene to the bleakest of places and seasons, and then sub-divides the plot into thousands of tiny events that he describes in page-long sentences and chapter-long paragraphs. There is hypertrophy of description and near-elimination of dialogue. Often

ANIMALINSIDE – EXCERPT

My little master, where have you gone? I look for you here, I look for you there, but I can’t find you anywhere; I’m really looking for you, though, because you are my little master, and I can’t find my little food-dish, it’s here, though, it’s here, here, dinner-time is

SATANTANGO – EXCERPT

Carefully, silently, she let herself down onto the woodpile, then slunk by the wall as far as the kitchen window, pressing her face to the cold glass. “It’s Micur!” The black cat sat on the kitchen table, happily lapping up the remnants of the paprika stew from the red saucepan.

LIFTING THE CURSE ON THE SEVSO TREASURE – PART I

Treasure is the stuff of which, according to Sam Spade, the detective played by Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese Falcon, dreams are made. Archaeologists are necessarily a little more precise in their use of the term than the authors of stories of adventure, mystery or piracy. This is limited to

FIVE POEMS FROM UNDER WORLD ARREST (1994)

NOTES “I awake at 5 AM seeing a Serbian bayonet…”: An attempt to “stew” in my consternation over reading of this hideous desecration of intercourse. The porcupine imagery acknowledges the poem’s attempt to enact some sort of retribution, to pierce the reader with its unfolding distress. The last line –