Budapest to Bellevue

Fülszöveg

FICTION $7.50 Peter Hargitai's journey from Budapest to Bellevue - from one crazy place to another - hits a heartbreaking chord in all those who are familiar with the experience of geographical, social, cultural, spiritual dislocation, commonly known as emigration. In the center of Hargitai's collection of stories and poems the victim of that age-old catastrophe stands, dazed by discoveries and memories, yet ready for accepting the unacceptable. Memories from the old country mix, in a wonderfully true and comic way, with the experiences of the new with results as unexpected as hilarious, for what really matters in these stories and poems is not the setting (old or new) but the reaction to those settings by the characters who alone could answer to the questions nobody had ever asked them before. Love story in the old country, soccer story in the new: the conflicts are not easily surmountable - hence the comedy of reversals and incongruities which lead one character to the... Tovább

Fülszöveg

FICTION $7.50 Peter Hargitai's journey from Budapest to Bellevue - from one crazy place to another - hits a heartbreaking chord in all those who are familiar with the experience of geographical, social, cultural, spiritual dislocation, commonly known as emigration. In the center of Hargitai's collection of stories and poems the victim of that age-old catastrophe stands, dazed by discoveries and memories, yet ready for accepting the unacceptable. Memories from the old country mix, in a wonderfully true and comic way, with the experiences of the new with results as unexpected as hilarious, for what really matters in these stories and poems is not the setting (old or new) but the reaction to those settings by the characters who alone could answer to the questions nobody had ever asked them before. Love story in the old country, soccer story in the new: the conflicts are not easily surmountable - hence the comedy of reversals and incongruities which lead one character to the understanding of his situation and another to Bellevue - yet Hargitai's power of narrative, insightful and compassionate evocation of character always points beyond the actual and leads us toward the spiritual; his happy endings are our liberations. In this emigré-world, Hargitai is involved, both psychologically and spiritually, to understand strangers in a strange land. But the success of Hargitai's stories - like the extension by a new persona of his cycle of poems - lies not simply in his talent of creating and evoking credible humán beings and weaving their destinies seamlessly together; it lies in the uniqueness of vision and insight which presents us with a world which is at once recognizable and originál, uniquely Hungárián and uniquely American or - to put it briefly - movingly humán. Tamás Aczél Vissza