Hungarian Fiction Week in B O D Y

All this week B O D Y is featuring newly translated Hungarian fiction, starting with Sándor Jászberényi’s story, “Banana Split“, of a lurid, drunken, drugged night in Cairo that veers into the borders between the hallucinatory and magical realism.

Then there’s the excerpt from Vilmos Csányi’s novel The Scent of Perfection, in which a young Teresa Sánchez de Cepeda y Ahumada, the future St Teresa of Ávila, discovers her young love is doomed because of her Jewish blood and resolves on her future path.

In Éva Péterfy-Novák’s short story “Moscow” a woman deeply convinced of the solidity of her marriage and her husband’s love for her has a first thread of doubt pulled from the fabric of her beliefs before the story turns towards a subtle but gripping conclusion.

The week will wrap up with Saturday European Fiction in a pair of short stories from Dániel Levente Pál’s The 8th District of God, a series of stories and sketches of a district of Budapest the writer describes as the “Zone”:

Native Hungarians and gypsies live here alongside Turks, Chinese, Vietnamese, Arabs, a myriad of Africans, exchange students, old revolutionaries, squatters, refugees, petty criminals and mafia-types, as well as followers of a dozen other sects and religions.

Here, in just a few square kilometers, you can find everything that defines our Europe, the old one and the new.”

Photo – Vajdahunyad utca 19. szám. Corvin negyed, Józsefváros, Budapest by Elekes Andor/wikimedia commons