In 1998, Attila Balázs's collection of short stories, Király Album (An Album of Király Street), received the Book of the Year award in its category. Balázs was born in 1955 in Újvidék (Novi Sad), in the Vojvodina, where he lived up to the autumn of 1991. The Serbo–Croatian war prompted him to move to Budapest. He has published four books of fiction, of which three novels appeared in Yugoslavia; Király Album was published in Budapest.

According to its subtitle, Király Album is "A Book of Stories". Not that this says much, for "story" here is probably meant in the sense writers of text literature use it. For example, Attila Bartis, among other contemporaries, in his volume of short stories A kéklő pára (The Blue Mist), in many respects similar to Balázs's, calls each short piece a "story" of something; László Darvasi called the bizarre, absurd texts in one of his volumes "brief stories", and the stories about story-telling in his latest volume "Hungarian stories". A "story", then, means an abstracted and, to a degree, ancient and mythical pattern ("book of stories" has a biblical overtone), and is also to be understood as a gesture typical of the postmodern narrative—I'll give you a "story", one feature of which is that it is not a true story at all, it has neither a beginning nor an end, and you cannot make much of it.

Király Album refers to the basic situation common to all the stories: in Király (King) Street in Budapest, the author, who is also the narrator and is identical with himself, recalls the legendary figures of his youth. He tells stories about them in fourteen chapters, commemorating them as though in a photograph album. Another common denominator is what makes them especially ominous now, at the time of NATO's bombing of Yugoslavia, and that is their being set in the Vojvodina, and Újvidék itself. These pieces are about people and relationships gone forever as a consequence of the Balkan wars of the 1990s. The author's own life is in fact the best example: he looks back on his homeland as though at a bygone, legendary and distant world, from which his entire new life sets him apart.

The first chapter is about the "great escape", the car journey from his home town to Budapest, escorted by policemen and border guards and beset by memories and anguish. "The Fortieth Summer"—he says in Chapter 2—"already found him in Király Street. Who ordained this and where is a question he has occasionally contemplated, never getting too far with an answer. He and his question have ended up and remained in Király Street." The first two chapters introduce that chatty, rambling, argumentative and idiosyncratic language that, like dense foliage, weaves through the Vojvodina myths from Chapter 3 on. To begin with, the narrator tells the story of two brothers. A thick set and ferocious drinker, Simon drags his brother, simple, delicate and fragile Imre, to the bar with him on a drinking spree. Late at night they break into an old woman's home in search of yet more wine, and Simon's punch kills the old woman. The police arrest him, while his brother Imi "was found weeks later by a pair of lovers in search of a trysting place, on the abandoned jungle of a pig farm, overgrown with weeds. Lifeless, he was lying on his back in the midst of the wild mallows, while crickets were making music around him. The small porcelain figure of the Pekinese dog was still in his hand"—the piece he had stolen from the old woman's house in the course of the scuffle that night. The story has been written for the sake of these sentences, this image—which lingers on in the narrator's memory as a ghostly vision from the past.

"A Story with Begonia" is about a girl bearing the bizarre name of Szidonia Begonics, from her early childhood when she was a little pink-ribboned girl, through years of almost conventual seclusion, until she unexpectedly takes up with Klepton the Goldfinger, a nine-fingered virtuoso bass guitarist at a fishermen's inn on the river Tisza, who "wore nine thick gold rings from Trieste plus two gold teeth". Klepton later returns from the Slavonian front in a sealed coffin. "A large wooden wedge was driven through his head—in through one ear, out through the other… Yet the grotesquely grinning corpse has ten fingers; it cannot be Klepi. Begonia loses no time in complaining to the military authorities, who shrug her off as a troublemaker. What does she want? At least she's got a body, others have to make do without one." Another metaphor, another situation, in which the grotesque and meandering story-line is brought to a point.

Blind and lame, Rihárd Konecsni is a torso in body, so is his "love story". He has a fine heart-shaped mouth, his body is as lithe as a leopard's, yet tied to a wheelchair. Brimming with stunted desires, he is initiated into manhood by a girl acquaintance with the help of the narrator in a forest clearing near the Danube. Both Begonia and Rihárd are residents on the Estate, an outlying, almost rural riverside area of the town in which the narrator has spent his childhood and youth and from where his strange, at times almost mythical and fantastic figures hail. "The Spanish Bicycle or The Toreador of the Estate" is a picaresque story about Péter Gombár, also known as Pepe Gonzales, son of a bicycle mechanic on the Estate, who derives miraculous power from the myth of the Minotaur and sails off to Spain and ends up a celebrated bull fighter.

"Through a curtain of woodbine foliage winding as the threads of a silly, drunken story, I looked out on the backwater," the narrator says in another story. "At times a fish jumped out and seemed to hover for some time above the water surface, in a long exposure, somewhat fat, lazy, before dropping back into the water with a splash." Attila Balázs's stories are like these woodbine scrolls, twining around almost drunken, at random, and he follows these drunken, chatty stories with ironic comments, asides, meditation, more loquaciously and arbitrarily than seems to be necessary. Occasionally a metaphor or a situation freezes into a still memorably, like that of the fish quoted above, then the winding story goes on. On one occasion the narrator remembers "Miss Cello", Emma Lévay, an old flame who played the violoncello and who "belonged to Captain Mukkholc", an eccentric bohemian, leader of the extras at Szabadka (Subotica) Theatre; later she bears him a child. The storms of history carry Emma to Austria, where she lives with the owner of a fast-food chain; from there she writes to the narrator, asking if he knows anything of her first child's father. The story is the narrator's reply to her request, complete with unmailed addenda though: one is an account, offered by an old acquaintance, of Captain Mukkholc's death caused by a landmine, the other is about the unconfirmed story of the narrator sighting him on a Budapest street from a trolley bus. However authentic or fantastic Attila Balázs's stories may seem at first, they never end, for the life of the community on the one-time Estate never came to an end back then—it was disrupted violently. The writer now tries to put together the broken shards.

In Zoltán Kőrösi's volume of stories, "AHandbook for Butchers", the protagonist of one story, a butcher, is called Attila Balázs—according to the blurb, the author's tribute to fellow writer Attila Balázs. Kőrösi was born in 1962, and has published five books so far. He has dedicated this latest one to his father, "him and all the other butchers". The division of the book also involves his father's trade, with sections called The Head; The Heart; and The Stomach.

Just as in Balázs, the themes and motifs of Körösi's stories are rooted in reality—this time, everyday life in Hungary; similarly too, the raw material is strongly processed and is given absurd and grotesque overtones. "On the Lemon Flavoured Sausage" is about a butcher in the capital city, an embittered bachelor who one day decides to make a break and moves to a rural town where he takes up work at a slaughterhouse. At the beginning the author warns his readers if they are sure "you want to read precisely this little story, instead of attending to so many important things you've got to do, hundreds of things to arrange and lots of games to play, promising joy and delight?" For the adventures of Mr Mlinarcsik offer no moral whatsoever, and are at places totally incredible, while the narrator gives his readers no explanation or information on any seemingly significant issues. What happens is that in the garden of Mr Mlinarcsik's new home, the lukewarm water of a natural spring suddenly starts flowing, bringing with it all sorts of old objects. The incident mobilizes all imaginable authorities and institutions, from the fire brigade through TV channels to archeologists. No explanation is found for the mysterious incident, and as an apparently independent development, Mr Mlinarcsik, accompanied by priests and pastors, weighs the truths of various denominations in various churches. Gaining no fundamental insight as to the butcher's trade, he dances a fox dance on the hilltop above the spring. It is also worth noting that this said hilltop, allegedly the peak of a mountain which can be climbed with difficulty, is found in a market town on the Great Hungarian Plain, flat as a table top.

In "The Lidi", the word figuring in the title, and short for Lidia, never once occurs. Commissioned by a businessman, three men want to bury a truckful of plastic material in a forest for good money. Before they do this, all kinds of mishaps occur; eventually water wells up from the hole they have dug—apparently, water gushing forth commands some special significance in Kőrösi's vision. On returning home, one of them seems to be wading in water, while his wife (could she be the Lidi perhaps?) beckons him to follow her and the two of them disappear into the night.

Departure, disappearance, beginning a new life and breaking with a previous life, are recurring themes in Kőrösi's stories. Mlinarcsik embarks upon a new life too, while in "Picture Postcard", a forester invites a doctor and his family to an abandoned hunter's lodge, saying he wants to show his gratitude for a life-saving operation the doctor had performed on him. The doctor has no memories of either the man or the operation; however, it turns out that both he and the forester have a younger brother who ran away from home, both occasionally giving signs of life through picture postcards sent from various stages of their travels. The parallel between the two young brothers (the forester's brother used to be a butcher!) is so unreal and contrived as a case of dreamlike identity, of magic doubles.

The heroine of "Aunt Aranyka is Far Away" used to be a chanteuse before escaping from the country in a goods wagon and ending up in Italy, where she married a well-to-do tile maker. Decades later she is widowed, and returns to her family, living on a considerable annuity. After a time, her eyes turn glassy too, upon which, under the direction of Grandfather, a former butcher who knows something about taxidermy too, Aranyka is stuffed. Unsuspecting, the postman continues to deliver her money from Italy, the source of the family's livelihood. Another consequence of Aranyka's is that the family home, registered as some 80 square metres, starts expanding from day to day, so that when the youngest son in the family, just like Aranyka (and the various butchers), wants to run away from the family home at dawn, he has to find his way from an immeasurably larger family residence—itself a veritable expedition. "I have packed up all I need, an extra pair of trousers, a striped cap, a piece of string, and food in a separate bag. Torch tied to the belt buckle, Swiss knife and matches in the side pocket. I have got everything, except the dawn is belated, and I am about to leave."

Kőrösi's short stories still have some contrived, purposefully literary character. Balancing on the borderline of reality and imagination, his stories attract attention more for their uncertain, tipping balance than for a sovereign and uniform vision.

After the more substantial novels written in the 1980s by Péter Nádas, Péter Esterházy, László Krasznahorkai, Péter Lengyel, György Spiró and Ferenc Temesi among others, in the nineties Hungarian fiction has been dominated by shorter forms. For lack of an adequate term, some pieces were designated novels, whereas they actually consisted of fragments of novellas and sections of texts. The majority of the books published in these years are short stories or simply "prose pieces", even if the pieces are called short stories— again for lack of a better word. In recent years, at the time of the new fashion of "stories", but also under the dominance of the short prose pieces, the texts seem to have taken on the form of a more or less regular short story—this is also borne out by this review. And where have all the novels gone, where are the genuine, big novels? Self-reflecting, reduced or minimalist, short pieces of fiction do not aim to be large-format masterpieces; a claim on greatness is alien to a small form and to the aesthetics of a state of being "perverted", "reduced" or "fragmented". Have the large forms died out? Their absence has been especially conspicuous and felt ever since the appearance of a glorious exception, the novel Jadviga párnája (Jadviga's Cushion) by Pál Závada.

István Kovács's autobiographical novel (or is it a novella?) A gyermekkor tündöklete (The Glory of Childhood) could also have been a grander and more comprehensive undertaking. It is not, even though the author worked on it for as many as twenty-six years—although with long intermissions, a consequence of his life and career. Born in 1945, István Kovács is a fine poet in the first place, of a breed for whom the poetic ego and the poet's role have not lost relevance yet and have not become relativistic. His themes are the eternal ones—history, nature, love, the arts. His associative metaphors and epitaph-like brevity recall the great tradition of 20th-century Hungarian poetry. Kovács is also a historian and teacher, a fineinterpreter in Hungarian of Polish history and culture; for a time he was a diplomat en poste in Poland too. Long years must have passed without being able to tackle his childhood autobiography. This hardly helped.

His childhood was in the fifties, the period which has been worked up by many and in many ways—Nádas in his short stories and Egy családregény vége (The End of a Family Saga); Lengyel in Cseréptörés (Broken Pottery); Vámos in Zenga zének (Let the Song Sound), Mihály Kornis in his play Halleluja; Tibor Fisher in Under the Frog. It was dealt with in films such as István Szabó's Father and A Love Film and Géza Bereményi's Eldorado. In comparison, "The Glory of Childhood" offers novelty in two respects––in theme and language. Kovács's narrator hero is similar to Nádas's and Lengyel's because he is also a fatherless orphan, but he differs too in that he grew up in a half-peasant, half-lower middle-class milieu, rather than an intellectual and professional environment. His mother, a young widow of peasant background, is a switchboard operator at a sanatorium near Budapest. When still a young girl, she had left her village before the war and moved to Budapest, trusting her good fortune. She almost fails, but manages to gain a foothold in the lower middle classes of the capital through marriage. Her husband is taken to Siberia by the Russians, but she, with her son born "unbidden", never gives up. She is typical of a new section of society so typical of that age, those released from a peasant way of life, trying to find a footing in the city. Kovács offers fine portraits of his relatives too, such as his grandmother on his father's side, widow of a railwayman living in a house with a garden in the green belt of the town, in cohabitation and constant fracas with the former great love of her life.

The focus is on the description of the more or less closed community of the sanatorium staff—mainly the children, his playmates—living and working in the same place. Kovács employs a strange narrative technique which is both the strength and the weakness of his book: he shuns any "message" or description of the age or portraiture—any representation of a content imposed on his métier a poste-riori, from the outside. He remembers not "the fifties", not how he grew into a poet or how his childhood may have influenced his personality. He describes from the angle of a child what he saw and how he lived in his immediate environment. Born as a blank sheet of paper, a child has no preconceptions about his environment or his age; he sees it as the only possible world, and understands as much of it as a child is capable of doing. Things and words often have meanings for him different from those they have for the adults who are "better versed" as regards interactions. A radio broadcast of the romantic opera Hunyadi László evokes in him an emotinal relationship with Matyi Hunyadi, a doctor at the sanatorium. The word "Jewish" for him means "lovely dark", for it was a lovely dark woman he heard thus described for the first time. For him, the picture of Stalin and Rákosi, hung in public places, at the porter's cabin or in the cultural hall, are not in fact separate from any private "portraits", of his father or Jesus. The mythology of the Soviet October Revolution is mixed with stereotypes of Western stories and adventures. There is but one essential point—the "better man" must win. By the time political antagonisms and class differences are filtered through and reach the little boy, they are blurred and changed in meaning.

All these provide authenticity to the child's perspective, and often humorously distort features of an age so familiar from elsewhere, such as fear, secretiveness, police bugging, etc.—yet they also make the narrative somewhat weightless. A child's perspective does not represent literary values in itself. The author may have sensed this, especially towards the end of the novel, for the narrator tries to expand his vision more often, ignoring even his earlier language. The memories peak in a description of the 1956 revolution, as much as a boy of eleven may have seen of it on the outskirts of the capital, in a sanatorium.

As his poems and essays testify, István Kovács has a special sensitivity towards history. The story of his life will certainly become more interesting from the time history looms up on the horizon.