Danilo Kiš Night and Fog John K. Cox, tr. Helena History Press Night and Fog, a collection of dramas and screenplays by Serbian writer Danilo Kiš, is filled with moving stories of people and their lives. Written during the Cold War and drawing from history (and also occasionally from Greek drama), this translation reveals Kiš’s thoughtful, precise, often-tragic writing in an accessible manner. Huang Chunming Stories Howard Goldblatt, tr. Renditions / Research Centre for Translation An artfully translated collection of six decades’ worth of short fiction, Stories captures the elegant simplicity of everyday life in Taiwan. Whether short story, novella, or (more recently) children’s literature, Huang Chunming’s work helped launch Taiwanese literature into a new, vibrant realm of cultural reflection (see WLT, Jan. 2010, 28–33). Nota Bene boyhood still apply. Agostino must reconcile the fact that the person he knows best is both a mother and a woman, making her simultaneously familiar and strange. Michael F. Moore has given us a wonderful new translation of a classic coming-of-age story set in the modern world. His translation is seamless and loyal to the original yet updated enough to appeal to contemporary readers. Andrew Martino Southern New Hampshire University László Szilasi. A harmadik híd: Magánérdekű feljegyzések Foghorn Péter halálának ügyében. Budapest. Magvető. 2014. isbn 9789631431667 László Szilasi’s novel Szentek hárfája (see WLT, Jan. 2011, 68) was largely about the history of his hometown, Békéscsaba, in southeastern Hungary . That was his first novel, critically acclaimed and winner of the Rotary Prize of 2011. As often happens, its success raised high expectations, to which the author responded with A harmadik híd (The third bridge), a new “urban” novel taking place mainly in another sizeable Hungarian town straddling two banks of the river Tisza: Szeged. Unlike the first book, A harmadik híd is not concerned with the town’s past but focuses on its present . While plenty of information is given about the topography of Szeged (there is even a map printed on the book’s endpapers), it only provides a background to the story of a group of homeless people. They have a leader, Peter Foghorn, better known as “Robot”; it is he who establishes some pattern in the lives of these men and women living on the rough edges of society. He presents them with a plan, a daily routine of walks to places where these unfortunates are regularly fed and can spend some hours in a warm shelter protected from the worst changes of weather. Members of the group are discussed both collectively and individually, partly to demonstrate the fact that there is nothing predetermined about the fall of a person’s social status, that while becoming homeless could be due to circumstances such as a bad divorce or loss of a lifelong partner, it might also be consciously chosen by an individual who has had enough of the “rat race.” Such is the choice of one of the narrators, Ferenc Nosztávszky, who was a schoolmate of Foghorn, who has the nickname “New Lad” among the homeless. Another narrator is Dénes (aka Damon Strahl), the conscientious and therefore frustrated detective. What makes them “qualified” for this task is their perspective, which is superior to that of the locals: both having traveled and lived abroad for many years, Nosztávszky in Canada, Strahl in Germany. They can see the differences between the West and their hometowns situated “close to the Balkans” and measure the loneliness of the homeless and also of the struggling homeowners of Szeged. In their own ways, both register the atomization of Hungarian society, the crisis that two decades earlier shattered the previous consensus—admittedly superficial and fragile—of social groups. The most dramatic moments of the novel are two murders, but what makes the book much more than a usual detective story is the author’s knack for capturing the atmosphere of a “rich” provincial town in Hungary , laying bare its false pretences, deep contradictions, and unctuously held beliefs. One of these is that there November–December 2014 • 61 reviews is “a way back...
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Sep 1, 2014
Laode Ida 
Open Access
