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Sándor Tar's short stories are no less genuinely Hungarian; his various collections have made him a major figure in contemporary Hungarian fiction. Self-taught, a former factory worker, he first wrote sociologically accurate stories about the hardships of the life of working people. He presented accounts of the barren, disconsolate life of people whom the official ideology proclaimed to be the celebrated winners and beneficiaries of the socialist state. Documentary in character, these stories did not gloss over the helplessness and misery of a working class described as socialist. Understandably he did not particularly endear himself with the leading lights of the party's cultural policy.
In his new short stories and especially in this latest collection, Slow Freight, the once verbose, occasionally rough, documentary presentation is replaced by a refined, terse, understated narrative style. Earlier Tar told stories about well definable groups of rural wage-earners turned city proles, and the declining peasantry, in itself limiting the validity of the stories. In Slow Freight he presents similar figures in a manner such that their fate reflects a comprehensive, valid vision. They exude the bitter, resigned experiences of the average Hungarian or even East European. Life as experienced by the protagonist of the story "Not to Die" is summed up: "We are waiting for the old people to die and the kids are waiting for us to die. What is in between is called life." Life is an unceasing, demoralising distribution of the little we have and a waiting for something that can only be gained through the death of others. This benefit, however, slowly diminishes during the waiting or, by the time it is obtained, the recipient is as good as dead. "You should fear moments of clarity for that's the end; what you've got to see before you is your wife, your kid and yourself, and the house you've got to build, it's a dream but you've got to. In any case it's best not to think, for thinking is death itself, and you should not die. Die, never. Not now. Later though, when it comes to that, you should die without thinking and staight away."
In another story, the protagonist is an intelligent hard-working technician who gradually loses everything—wife, job, home and hope. He then moves to a farmstead on the Hungarian plain for the rest of his life, and "has no other intent except living as long as he could forget everything." The most you can attain in life is to forget about your life before your death, forget all the efforts you made to gain a foothold for a life fit for man.
Sándor Tar writes on helplessness, degradation and resignation. His typical figures are the unemployed, the homeless and the drunk, the vegetating old and the mercilessly pushy young, who believe there is something in life for them, and push their parents out of their way.

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