Anna Jókai's new novel Ne féljetek (Fear Not) has had a very good reception, unusual enough in recent times. Among a readership that is hard to define, Anna Jókai has always been a popular author, but the more prestigious critics have largely ignored her. The usual explanation for a situation like this is that we have a bestselling author who writes for the market and who relies on proven recipes in satisfying public demand. Aside from the fact that a critic's task should include the analysis of popular taste, it should be said that Anna Jókai does not fit at all into the category of "a bestselling author". Emotionally involved with her stories and characters, she always writes on what is of personal interest to herself, instead of trying to anticipate what potential readers expect from her.

Fear Not is about old age and death. It is also about faith: the overcoming of the fear of death through Christian faith. This is not exactly the type of subject that the average reader would go for. Having said that, the stories of the aging characters, who gradually come to terms with death, are embedded in the Hungary of the past two decades, and that is what could appeal to readers, especially since contemporary "high literature" more or less ignores the lives of ordinary people to which readers could relate. Besides discussing old age, anxiety over death, physical decline and preparation for the other world, Fear Not is also a family saga with a social picture of the period, and a demand for that undoubtedly exists. The other highly successful Hungarian novel of this year, Jadviga párnája (Jadviga's Cushion) by Pál Závada, which in a way is also a family saga, also proves the existence of that demand beyond reasonable doubt.

Anna Jókai's novel tells the story of four parallel lives from the second half of the 1970s to recent times. The four people form two couples, one married, the another unmarried. At the centre of the story is Mária, a retired air-stewardess. At the beginning of the book, she is still an attractive and healthy woman, who lives in a stable and harmonious relationship with her husband, Richard, a moderately prosperous lawyer. They admirably complement each other: Mária is a sensitive, educated and religious woman, Richard is a practical man with both feet firmly on the ground, who looks after his family. This is Mária's third relationship: she has two grown-up children by her first husband, whom she had divorced a long time ago.

She fell in love with the third man in her life, Márió, when her first marriage was in a deep crisis. While it meant a great deal to both of them at the time, they eventually broke up. In the period covered by the book, Márió is living with Villő, and he meets Mária only once more, and even then only in passing; nevertheless, they both feel a painful void whenever they think of each other.

A psychologist by profession, Márió is an intellectual with dissident views, greatly respected by his students and his patients, yet the way to career advancement is closed to him. Not that he minds. Villő is a social worker, active at the beginning, but retires after a while. Unlike Márió, who is a basically vain and aloof man given to depression, Villő is a simple soul; still, she can see many things in greater clarity, thanks to her natural female empathy. In the first third of the novel, the independent lives of the two couples are introduced in a sweeping exposition, roughly spanning one decade. Although already getting on in years, the four characters are presented still in their full vigour in this part of the book, with ample details of their sexual activity.

The narrative method is something special. Fragments of the characters' in-terior monologues intermit the narrative. With the former method playing the lead, the characters regularly take their turn, with their names indicated on the margin. Between these fragmented monologues, which rarely exceed half a page, we find even shorter narrative parts, which usually prepare for the next monologue. In this way the perspective is continuously changing between the objective and the subjective.

At the beginning of the second part, a heart attack suddenly kills Richard, the person who seemed the strongest and the hardiest. For Mária, now in her sixties, a dark period begins. While earlier on she tried to see aging more as a personal enrichment and consummation, now she goes through a serious crisis. Her life seems to grow gradually more and more empty, her family drifting away from her, and she struggles with anxiety about death as well as other psychological problems. She looks for solace and support in her faith but for quite a while without success. She knows and understands what Christ's exhortation "Fear not" means, yet she cannot transform it into a deep faith. Finally she is able to find peace of mind in an unconditional and selfless love for her children and grandchildren, which makes her accept loneliness and approaching death. Mária's story is taken right to her death bed, which thus becomes the exemplary story of inner purification and spiritual enlightenment.

Márió and Villő also pass through a painful period of depression, forbearance and sickness, and they, too, are able to overcome. In their story it is primarily their relationship that suffers from the trials and tribulations of aging, so much so that they almost lose each other; then, through caring for each other, they find the strength to face death. At the end of the book, Villő says farewell to Márió.

Besides the four main characters, the novel introduces members of Mária's family. It is primarily in the reference to their lives that the story of the past decades emerges. Through Márió's deliberations the period's political and social developments and mentalities also find expression in a more abstract form. Luckily, the inner and the outer spheres are not discussed separately; nevertheless the spiritual dimension and the societal portrait sometimes do not mix well.

Despite its values and intricacies, Fear Not is not a powerful work. A little over-polished, it becomes long-winded towards the end. When applied over several hundreds of pages, the narrative technique eventually becomes automatic and monotonous, indeed the internal monologues occasionally sound contrived. Sometimes they explain things that should be self-evident, and thus their monologues are being blatantly addressed to the readers. There are too many clichés in Márió's deliberations, and too many trivialities in Mária's and Villő's problems. The everyday layer of the novel has something of a soap opera about it, which is good and bad at the same time. On the one hand why should literature not learn something from television, in the same way that the cinema and television have learned so much from literature? Where is it laid down that soap operas should be shallow? On the other hand, the ready-made patterns tend to produce clichés.

We might view this layer of the novel as a popular formula which enables less sophisticated readers to relate to the passions of the characters; the great success of the book-it was voted Book of the Year in 1999 in the novel category-shows that the formula works: thousands of readers may discover the secret resources of their personalities, learning ways of how to live with old age and the thought of death.

János Háy was first a poet, before writing in the early nineties Dzhigerdilen, a seemingly historical novel set in Hungary under Turkish occupation. It constituted more of an imitation and persiflage of the clichés found in textbooks on history and in those naive historical novels that shape our picture of history in our youth. Háy belongs to those postmodern authors who conceive storytelling not in the form of relating "true" stories, but of creating texts, the rules of which can be jazzed up at will.

On the surface, his new book Xanadu is also a historical novel, insofar as it has a storyline that takes us back to late-fifteenth-century Venice, Pirano on the Istrian peninsula, the Adriatic and the Mediterranean. The central character is a merchant of Venice, who courses the sea with his goods during the summer and spends the winter with his wife at home. Háy has been inspired by a particular legend, according to which once there was a merchant in Venice who fell head over heels in love with a beautiful girl in Pirano. He bought her from her father for 200 ducats and built her a lavish palace on the harbour where they could make merry while he was there. This palace still stands in Pirano, now called Piran, and there is an inscription in Italian on the façade: Lassa pur dir-Let them gossip. The merchant had it inscribed there: let the people of Pirano gossip, he did not care, for him the girl was worth all the trouble. According to Háy's version, after a few years, the merchant ended his sea-going days and entrusted his captain with his business. When summer came, he still left Venice, and secretly went ashore in Pirano to stay with his lover until autumn, when his argosy returned loaded with goods. However, fate played a cruel joke on him: he was not the only one who was unfaithful; rumour had it that the girl, too, cheated on him during the winter. On hearing this he rushed off to Pirano and killed his lover in his first anger.

Háy tells this legend amidst numerous long-winded detours, as if his narrator himself were bent on defying the rules of economical storytelling, saying "Let critics say whatever they want, I gibber as much as I please, this legend is only an excuse for me to improvise text fragments according to my own whims. The novel comes with the subtitle "Earth, water, air", which can be read as "as you like it", meaning that the narrator feels free to roam about the world of his own creation. In the aerial dimension this world extends right up to God who, with his angels, regularly appears, sitting pretty in heaven, living lives full of intrigues and unruly behaviour, watching earthlings closely.

The two angels Marlon and Marion, for example, fell in love with each other, which leads to God assigning them with the guardianship of the icebergs of the two poles. But whenever passion overcomes them, they heat up so much that the icebergs begin to melt. Finally God has had enough; he gives another assignment to Marion, who then has to yearn after his girl for all eternity.

Another version(?), or a later chapter(?), of Marlon's story is told to the merchant's sailors in a tavern by Vincius, the ancient sage of Pirano. According to his version, Marlon once stole out of the celestial palace, and from the barbican peered down through the skin, muscles and bones, right to the soul, where he could see that the girl he had left down below still loved him. He just watched her with despair, then said to himself: I won't be an angel! He cast himself off from the barbican, flying through air, skin and muscle, right to the soul, but before he could get a hold there, he felt a great force pulling him back, as if he had been attached to the palace by a spring; and the girl felt the pain grow. The angel jumped off again with an even wilder kick, only to experience the same pull on reaching the edge of the soul; twice more he tried, but the girl now seemed to be in agony. After the fourth try, the angel looked back and saw God holding his suspenders; he realized that he would never be able to reach that soul, because it was not up to him to decide whether he would be an angel or not.

The disarmingly naive celestial scenes and angel stories are, of course, related to the legendary chronicle of our merchant of Venice and his lover: it is almost as if the same old story would be repeated all over again everywhere: sooner or later, "man" inevitably emerges from all creatures of the earth and sky, longing for the other half, but never quite being able to unite with it. The very title Xanadu refers to such a legend: "In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure dome decree" for his lover; chased away by her enemies after the Khan's death, she was eventually sold off to the Caliph's harem. The latter made her his favourite concubine, but no matter what he did he could not help feeling that "his power ended at the boundary of the woman's skin, and that this human-size patch on the painting of the world was outside his empire".

Such a reading would, however, lend the book a character more serious than it is actually entitled to, because of its frolicsome excesses, its arrogant linguistic anachronisms and foul language. Háy's book is in fact a textual cocktail of flavours, which might or might not appeal to readers. Some will appreciate this stylistic cavalcade of irony and parody, a clever imitation of naive painting, or the dazzling collection of legends of a crafty story-teller. But some will be fed up with these stylistic feats and will find no pleasure in a novel that has very little to do with the real world around them.

In his new book Tizedelőcédulák (Decimation Lots), Márton Kalász turns to the history of German families living in Hungary. According to family tradition, the regiment in which the great-grandfather of one Swabian family had served was literally decimated after the collapse of the War of Independence in 1848/49. Nine white lots and one black were placed in an urn; those who drew the black lots were executed. The great-grandfather survived, but it had been possible for a Swabian Hungarian soldier to fall victim to the Austrians' revenge. Later on, with the advance of civilization, new and sophisticated methods were employed in Eastern and Central Europe to thin out the non-desirable nationalities by decimation, or by quartering or halving them. At one point in history it was the Germans' turn. The word "decimation" has all but lost its original meaning; nowadays it is called ethnic cleansing or genocide and, as shown recently in Yugoslavia, it remains alive and kicking.

It would be difficult to ascertain exactly when and where the chain reaction of ethnic cleansing began. The fact is that there was a time, not all that long ago, in the 18th century, when foreign settlers came to Hungary in large numbers; soon they felt at home here, so much so that in less than a century their descendants were already fighting as Hungarian soldiers for the cause of Hungarian liberty and bourgeois progress. It was precisely the Germans, the Saxons who founded towns in mediaeval Hungary and the Swabians who came during Maria Theresa's reign to re-populate the deserted lands in the wake of Ottoman rule, who played a crucial role in promoting a burgher lifestyle in Hungary. In some cases this was in direct opposition to the colonizing ambitions of Imperial Austria. Regardless of the occasional conflicts, the Germans constituted a body politic for centuries in Hungary, notably in Transylvania and in Upper Hungary, where they were a driving force both economically and culturally. They were also to be found in the Bánát and Bácska, Tolna and Baranya, or around Buda, where they formed self-contained economic units.

Márton Kalász, who is of German stock himself, has published facts and episodes arranged in a historical chronicle using private, unpublished documents, personal memoirs and family history about the Germans in Hungary, with special regard to their twentieth-century history, the role of the infamous Nazi Volksbund and the reprisals following its dissolution. The first half of the two-part book forms a chronicle, a historical account spanning from the 18th-century settlers to the fall of the Volksbund. The entire second part is dedicated to the deportations to the Soviet Union and to the expulsion to Germany, producing a trauma that has apparently remained a crucial and painful experience both for Kalász and for all the people he interviewed.

It is not the first time that Kalász turns to this subject: in his outstanding novel Téli bárány (Winter Lamb), which was published in 1986, he also portrayed the period of population exchanges on the basis of personal recollections. The novel makes it clear what kept these Germans bound to this place: land, work, and the village community. This was their homeland, and they had no desire for other country, other nation, other Lebensraum. Everything that the politicians and party officials cooked up in the cities seemed remote and far-fetched to them, and it filtered through to their isolated, archaic village communities in a distorted manner, with its demagogue character plainly exposed.

Similarly to that novel Decimation Lots is characterized by the detached and almost dry tone of a chronicler: the author lets the facts and the eyewitness accounts do the talking. The narrator's interference is extremely spare, in some cases almost ascetic: the author seems determined to refrain from passing judgment, or jumping to conclusions, which might put a political, historical or moral spin on the events. Even on those rare occasions when he does open up the perspective, it is only to provide facts, statistics or assumptions. He is obviously aware that he is treading on dangerous ground. Up until recently, it was not possible to talk openly about the expulsion of the Swabians. In Béla Bellér's book A magyarországi németek rövid története (A Brief History of Hungary's German Minority), published in 1981, the author mentions the expulsion only in a very brief concluding chapter. He writes: "Today we still do not possess the necessary historical perspective and factual information that would enable us to give an accurate and unbiased Marxist evaluation of the period of resettlement. So much is undoubtedly clear, however, that some mistakes were made in the execution..." One such mistake, according to Bellér, was that in the early phase of the resettlements consid-erations of social class weighed very little.

Although he carefully avoided even the suggestion, Kalász is probably of the opinion that the Germans should not have been expelled at all, since that served no historical justice. Many people would probably agree with that today. But of course it is easy to be calm and rational in retrospect-back then passions ran high, and not without reason. The flight and expulsion of Germans, seen all over Eastern Europe, not just in Hungary, had been preceded by Nazi war crimes and the Holocaust, and in this the Volksbund had taken an active part. At the height of its power, this organization-according to Bellér-had 200,000 members (300,000 if we count its youth and women's sections), which was 41 or 42 per cent of the 720,000-strong German population in Hungary. The ringleaders wholeheartedly supported Nazi interests. Also, not only Germans were expelled at the end of the war, essentially on the warrant of the Allied Powers; hundreds of thousands of Hungarians also had to flee their homeland, mostly in Northern Hungary, but also in Transylvania, Bukovina and the Bánát, and they needed housing. The Szeklers of Bukovina and the Hungarians of Northern Hungary were mainly resettled in villages evacuated by Germans.

Therefore, the German question cannot be discussed and evaluated in isolation from the other issues. Their tragedy formed part of a larger, much broader tragedy, in which other ethnic groups also fell victim and (assuming that it is possible at all to make such comparisons) paid an even higher price. Kalász, therefore, is not out to do justice, to redress past wrongs, as nothing can be set right in retrospect. His only aim has been to show how brutal and unfair the whole thing had been from the viewpoint of the individual German victims. Perhaps it was understandable from a psychological viewpoint at the time, but collective punishment proved to be senseless in the end, unfair and inhuman. It affected hundreds of thousands of innocent people, with no guarantees that the true villains would be punished. Probably a large number of incriminated Volksbund members escaped from the locals' revenge precisely by fleeing to, or being expelled to Germany. And as regards Eastern Europe as a whole, millions of people were uprooted in the infamous "population exchanges", robbing a number of countries of one of their valuable and important elements. Was that the right way to revenge the genocide and the cultural destruction that the Germans committed against the peoples of the region, principally the Jews?

Márton Kalász does not try to rehabilitate the German victims of expulsion, whose memories he commits to paper. He only wants to show that these people, who mostly live in Baden-Würtenberg and who are all getting on in years, have settled down and are prosperous, and neither they nor their grandchildren would ever come back to Hungary, even though they would be entitled to do so. These people once regarded themselves as Hungarian citizens, and thought of Hungary as their homeland, just like the earlier mentioned grandfather who the Austrians had made draw a lot; in Germany, which is their fatherland now, they no longer feel homesick, but whenever they visit Hungary and look at their old homes, they feel a painful void, an irreparable loss, the memory of a paradise lost. Some of these people tried to come back illegally to Hungary through Austria, at the time when the Hungarians were fleeing in the other direction. Some even succeeded and now live in Hungary. One might ask the cynical question: Who is better off? Those who lived safely in West Germany between 1948 and 1989 or those who stayed behind? Kalász does not ask such questions; he only presents human stories in order to show that people do not necessarily agree with political ideologies and social value systems as to what they regard to be the most important in their lives. One thing should be added, however; those who committed crimes must be called to account. The other extreme, for which recent history seems to produce evidence, would be equally wrong: that crimes should always go without punishment.