Guardian World Literature Tour: Hungary

There really should be a RSS feed, or weekly summary, or title list recap, or something for the comments section of this Guardian blog feature. Every month the Guardian and its readers discusses literature from a particular country. Last month it was Germany, this month Hungary.

And every month we post about this, make silent promises to check in on a weekly basis to see which titles are being praised, and yet, and yet . . .

Thankfully, this first post about Hungary includes a brief recap of which authors came up during the German discussion. Most of the typical names were referenced: Mann, Heine, Holderlin, Hesse, Rilke, and Timm. Sasa Stanisic also got some praise for How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone, which is especially interesting, since he was born in Serbia, but has spent half his life in Germany. (This book is coming out from Grove in the very near future, and, if 2666 doesn’t arrive today—please US Postal Service gods, please—is the book that I’m going to start reading tonight.)

Anyway, the discussion on Hungary should prove interesting. Although the host has only read Kertesz’s Fatelessness, there are actually a number of interesting Hungarian writers whose books are available in English. There are many more Kertesz books available, including a few from Melville House, and George Konrad is a very interesting writer. Laszlo Krasznahorkai is fascinating, and his The Melancholy of Resistance pretty amazing, and Sunflower by Gyula Krudy was one of my favorite books of 2007.

Good to see Hungarian lit getting some attention . . . Maybe Sara Kramer from NYRB really is on to something when she claimed that this would be the year of the Hungarians . . .