The very idea of collecting nineteen short stories seemingly selected at random, and in English to boot, invites not only the customary, a priori objections but a skeptical wince. Granted, all the representatives are established contemporary authors (eight men and three women, ranging from forty-five to eighty-three years of age) who have achieved fame both at home and abroad. Still, the selection appears arbitrary and unbalanced, (the female writers are allotted a total of thirty pages out of 322), lacking any thematic or other conceptual unifying component other than that each piece has already been translated into English by Eszter Molnár and featured in The Hungarian Quarterly.

On the jacket, Thy Kingdom Come promises "a wide variety of the best quality Hungarian literature, along with a slice of Hungarian reality" and that it delivers indeed. It also provides a cross selection of the best and most prolific authors, complete with photographs, biographies, lists of awards and foreign editions of their works. An additional bonus is Eszter Molnár's superb translation. In an enjoyable and genuinely idiomatic English, the translator allows every author's voice distinction while maintaining a feel for the whole. It is a horrendous task to have to produce such an accurate, sensitive, "native-sounding" translation of these notoriously challenging authors. Ms Molnár deserves equal credit with her "customers."

The stories are extremely depressing, featuring unfathomable poverty and antiheroes consumed by existential anguish, alienation, rootlessness, exploitation (espe-cially of children, illiterate labourers and the homeless), physical and psychological torture, pain and suffering. By and large, a dark mood prevails and most denouements are bleak or bittersweet at best; this holds irrespective of the style or trend, be it realism, naturalism, surrealism, stream of consciousness, utopia, absurdity or postmodernism.

Ádám Bodor, the sixty-three-year-old Transylvanian writer now living in Hungary, first achieved immense success with his magical short stories, and in 1993 acquired international fame with a run-away bestseller, Sinistra District. Translated at once into a dozen languages, this thin volume of spellbinding tales (subtitled "Chapters of a Novel") is a cycle of fifteen stories (three of which are in our volume) -each complete in itself-forming a novel of sorts. Here we are in the realm of an anti-utopia, a cursed, amoral totalitarian existence poignantly familiar. The ambiguous setting is somewhere in the Carpathian Mountains in Romania. In this dark, devastating region, a "freezing hell," people live in captivity, some in enforced bondage, some in self-imposed exile. The balefully restricted territory, controlled by the sadistic secret police, is not simply a fictional penal colony but an absurd, postmodern gulag, an irrational survival zone of demonic proportion. The novel's antihero, Andrej Bodor, is both narrator and victim of a series of most terrifying happenings facilitated by the "grey goons," Ceausescu's militiamen. Andrej never displays any emotion even in the most hor-rific or senseless situations: at sight of murders, tortures, an eyeball on the road, a frozen human ear in a rodent's mouth, and much more. What unfolds in these tales is as absurd, incomprehensible, and horrible as it is logical. The district is populated by subhuman, animal-like creatures clad in rags, subsisting on frozen potatoes, mushrooms and methyl alcohol. These buglike, Kafkaesque characters are both animalistic and mechanical; distorted archetypes, though they both epitomize and symbolize multiethnic nationalities and different social classes. For instance: there are the two Petrika Hamzas, homosexual twins servicing all the needs of the half- wit innkeeper Doktor Oleinek, the dwarf Gabruel Dunka tarnishes glass with sand for the prisons, the truck driver Mustafa Mukkerman, who transports frozen carcas-ses, corpses and smuggles people, Coca-Mavrodin, the woman forest commissioner who will freeze to death, and scores of other freaks; they ably serve as collective metaphors for this much-tormented region. The true main character, however, the omnipotent tyrant, is nature. Each episode contains superb descriptions of the frigid landscape and its elementary power over the living. Bodor's unique stylistic devices (typical of folk ballads and surreal horror stories), his beguiling characterization, succinct descriptions and dialogue, dark vision and humour enable the reader to consider the physical and metaphysical, the realistic and mythical, as no longer opposites but rather the organic surface of a bizarre totality. The measured, elegant sentences balance on the edge of naturalism and grotesque parable-making in these repulsive yet persuasive tales.

Lajos Grendel, a fifty-one-year-old Hungarian from Slovakia, is an enigmatic author; social criticism and political satire, delivered with savage grin and humour, abound in "The Story That Didn't Make the News." It presents an ordinary Slovak apartment house where one night a group of armed men simply occupy the cellar and order everyone to leave. Who they were, how many and why they came no one knows. The frightened, typical low-class residents rally around the chairman of the tenants' committee; they spread rumours, attend inane mass-meetings, whisper all-knowingly that "it must have been the Hungarians, or the Jews, or the Gypsies who had masterminded the vile attack". The delegation sent to negotiate with the intruders returns with the demand that the building must be handed over to the rebels, all tenants must leave at once. Cursing, they all move out. The chairman "left the perilous neighbourhood stealthily... it crossed his mind that perhaps he ought to have resigned before leaving, but he did not have the heart to turn back. His tenants had given evidence of great patience, civil discipline and wisdom... some will supply the troops, others will engage in the fighting. The way it usually happens." Grendel's misleadingly "relevant," confessional text, intimating scathing indignation, is eclipsed by a new mood of skepticism, cynicism and facetiousness that further qualify him to be a genuine postmodern writer. His rapid portraits and occasional acrid vision of feelings may appear indistinct but never indifferent; he effects us and convinces us.

The youngest and most controversial author is László Krasznahorkai (at 45 he has a sixties look, long hair, beard, shapeless fedora hat, scarf and black Zorro cape), whose two challenging, though not a little chaotic stories lead us into Beckettian landscapes where absurdity pervades in the postmodern fashion of self-referencing. In "The Last Boat," for instance, all the dialogue is put in footnotes; the entire text is a giant non-sequitur paragraph, anecdotes are begun but left incomplete to be replaced by other fragments; in the convoluted sentences, amid humorous asides, there is no unity of theme, mood or narrative. In "Getting Away from Bogdanovich" (as in his award-winning novels), he portrays an eerie apocalypse of the socialist reality in Eastern Europe; it is a nightmarish pursuit of the eponymous "hero." Ultimately the story's tediousness is as profound as the alleged themes. A philosophical story-teller, he is a new mystic without God, in quest of a "postmodern divinity" through harmony with the "awful, hitherto unknown, drastic disquiet world and its creatures." His novels-Sátántangó/Satan Tango, 1986, made into a successful seven-hour film; Az ellen-állás melankóliája/The Melancholy of Resistance, 1999, of which a chapter appeared in the HQ (No. 152, Winter 1998) in a translation by George Szirtes, and the recent Háború és háború/War and War, 1999)-are about the possessed and the obsessed, they are set in disintegrating, decaying country towns in Eastern Europe where (except for War and War a group of satanic people will soon arrive to take over. His realistically described world is devoid of all human values and instinct an menace prevail. Another of his bestselling books was a spellbinding account of his solitary railway trip-via Siberia-to Communist China in the eighties.

On the opposite spectrum stands the popular, often awarded and translated writer of children literature, Ervin Lázár, who contributes one story "The Porcelain Doll." Despite the classical, crystal-clear style and realistic descriptions, we are led into the Twilight Zone, in a weird, dreary, faraway village in the Hungarian prairie, the puszta. A modern-day miracle worker shakes up the populace with his "ability to resurrect the dead." Woebegone mothers faint as their children's coffins are unearthed and "corpses" suddenly come to life. Like the Rainmaker, this impostor disappears next day and life will never be the same again. The hope-for-one-day is more than the customary superstition of the village, the Lazarus theme is universal, crossing all cultural boundaries. Lázár writes with gentle irony and in elliptical fashion; here and there the story flaunts elements of the grotesque and the surreal as well. Despite the realistic exposé, it is hard at first to escape the impression that nothing really believable is happening. Yet, the anticipation is sustained-and not in vain. The narrator manages to maintain a mystique that bedazzles the reader to the point of misty eyes, it's catharsis ŕ la mode. No vestiges of modernism, only honesty and emotive power, compassion, and velvety, caressing story telling.

The sixty-year-old Péter Lengyel is already something of a classic; his awards and the list of foreign editions of his novels barely fit into the assigned space.

A brilliant translator, editor and teacher, Lengyel is first and foremost a highly re- spected, highly talented novelist. He clearly demonstrates his contagious nostalgia, intellectual sincerity and style (post-Joyceian stream-of-consciousness) in two gems: "Merry-go-round", a chapter from the novel Macskakő (Cobblestone) and "Boulevard in the Rain, l928." In both, the action takes place in meditated flashback, while the current time seems frozen as the narrator stares incessantly at the computer screen in his MS-filled, overcrowded study. The text, detailed and precise, is peppered with contemporary songs, ditties, aphorisms, word games, children's rhythms, random verbiage, political slogans, jokes and mock totems. At parts the score is either hypnotic or tedious, depending on one's taste. In both stories so fascinating are the details, colourful the characters, that the author might almost be forgiven for keeping silent about how he performed this miracle, like water changing into wine: his painting a vibrant canvas of the past while re-enacting the vulgar present. He takes us from time to time and space to space with the greatest of ease. Writing during communism, he combines scathing social criticism with cunning, elusive misspellings or using heavily metaphoric idioms. The occasional arbitrary linguistic stunts are tempered by a resigned humour. Like Ferenc Molnár in his plays, Lengyel in his prose (his work conjures up his idol, Marquese) pays a touching tribute to his beloved hometown.

Undeservedly, Aliz Mosonyi (55 years old) is perhaps the least known among these authors. Her Shop Tales, a charming, absurd series, is the shortest text in the volume, bringing to mind István Örkény's one minute stories. On an imaginary street sprawls a number of fictional shops, each elegantly described in paragraph-size bites: "The Shop of Maps" requires a brief recitation of autobiography after which the shopkeeper "takes out a map, pins a tiny flag onto it and says, ‘Here you are. This is where life tossed you.'" In another intriguing piece, "The Shop of Practical Doughnuts," a question is asked: "Is life a sour doughnut? Or a sweet one?" "You've got to buy one and try one. Then you'll know." Finally, "The Shop that Once Was" is precisely what it says. Ms. Mosonyi should have been represented more generously.

Now comes another heavy-weight, the internationally known playwright, novelist, translator, Slavist scholar, dramaturge supreme, György Spiró, who provides two pieces. Each of the two dozen books by this irascible gadfly, evokes extreme reactions and controversy, all the sound andfury, the panegyrics and scorn are motivated by social, racial and political reasons in any given era. In "Utopia," he sets out to reveal the hard truth, to contrast the sham and the real in present-day Hungary, in an allegorical tale about rebuilding life after the Holocaust. Such a premise, or promise, is audacious and preposterous, but Spiró delivers the goods. This brief story-de-lineated with cool irony and dry humour, though in a somewhat cynical manner- draws a penetrating picture of how people "manage to survive." In "Forest," on the other hand, he tells a hilarious, well- woven tapestry of romance and farce, in effect, a moving and also tragic autobiographical tale of lost love. Added curiosity here is the setting: the main characters (then still husband and wife) are "travelling on a local train, along the Moscow-Gorky line immortalized in Russian fiction." He was to meet the wife's new lover, a "superannuated Bulgarian ballet dancer", who was now living with his pregnant Russian girlfriend ("anything can happen in Russia!"). Within this framework Spiró comments on contemporary Russian poetry, social problems, Jewish immigration, the nineteenth-century Hungarian War of Independence, and much more. The story evokes a ponderous and powerful breath of Russian life-an amalgam of cruelty, compassion, drunkenness, unexpected delicacy and joie de vivre. In the anticlimactic conclusion, the ex-wife is dying of cancer and the cuckolded, super-cool ex-husband is apparently devastated. The author's dialogue and eye for detail show that realism and farce are not distant cousins, that absurdity can be mined from simple events without diminishing either verity or humour. Occasional pontifications notwithstanding, even these short samples testify to Spiró's unique talent.

The 82-year-old Magda Szabó, winner of many prizes, whose great body of work (close to forty volumes in every genre) has been widely translated, appears here only with one delicious morsel. "Silver Ball" is enough to justify the entire volume and prove her exquisite style, humour and mesmerizing sensitivity of themes. Szabó gained renown primarily through her novels and their extraordinary heroines. Though not a feminist, she succeeds in redirecting the focus on women (all ages) through her prose. Here the heroine is herself a little girl, whose relentless curiosity gets her into trouble with majestic grand dames amid the family. While a charming mystery is solved, the story is pregnant with her self-ironizing distance, detached gestures with which she interrupts herself, seldom erupting muted fury, precocious musings of a child, along with moral seriousness and ethical anguish. Furthermore, she re-enacts with nostalgia the erosion of human values, the irretrievable past, fossilized evidence of an extinct social class-the gentry and the Calvinist country professional classes-a tradition-filled culture and a world that has been obliterated.

The sixty-year-old Dezső Tandori, a prolific, path-breaking poet, writer, translator, graphic artist and performer, who has won numerous prizes, awards and has been published abroad frequently, is under-represented here by one piece. "Baalbeck Hotel" combines sophistication and periodic mondaineity in which he is acting as a cantankerous, haughty, old critic and a sentimental bird-father, with brazen insouciance and terrifying cleverness. The bird-aficionado is at once a democrat and a snob, a seminar-room grandee and a party pooper who, at times, falls prey to some vices that afflict the most talented writers: gigantism, obscurantism, verbosity and cognate authorial hauteur. Still, he is thoroughly committed to keeping up the appearance of kindness (especially to animals), but underneath all the musings Tandori appears cold and controversial. While he is an expert on horse-racing, tennis, mysteries, movies, Australian and other kinds of wine, sparrows and Wittgenstein, his tale basically depicts a stifled, nerve-wrecking stay in England. It is an unflinching examination of loneliness and a trenchant trajectory of negation too. A genuine non-story, postmodern to a tee, it is studded with asides, fragments and other ultra-modern literary paraphernalia. Here is the opening: "Everything-happened in Worchester! That everything had to happen there. On Friday, January 3rd, l993 in Worchester. What do I have to arrive on Saturday for? What for? Well, never mind. I read ‘Yesterday's results, Worchester,' And then again, ‘continued from page 7.' And in the meantime." This cold-hearted, ferociously educated, enigmatic, fascinating and at times infuriating author is dedicated to the power of the "master narrative," a writer determinedly of our time endowed with a bibliography that is 19th century in its variety and magnitude. The vivid vignette of the English landscape, his busy schedule there-in, provides a perfect venue for Tandori to disseminate one of his pet credos: there are no masterpieces today because our moment is "post-Gutenberg and pre-Apocalypse;" what reigns now is generalized corruption, mechanized inhumanity leading to the obsolescence of literature, whose place is taken by the idiot box. This is no post-structuralist criticism or semiotic explanation, it is a rightful modern outrage by extension but, to make sure, do check into his Baalbek Hotel and judge for yourself how gifted this cosmopolitan wanderer is.

The most generous space (87 pages) was awarded to Sándor Tar-his story sets the volume's tone and yields its title-a relative newcomer whose rise to fame was as rapid as his output enormous. At fifty-eight Tar, an eminent social documentarist, began to pen imaginative novellas which are both brilliant contrivances and masterpieces of naturalism. In every story his familiar stock figures are the downtrodden, stuck in mud and squalor, the lumpen, both urban and rural. His turf is the poor region of the Great Plains in northeast Hungary, where in dilapidated factories, overcrowded tenement houses, filthy shanties, stinking bars, and rumbling, slow freight trains we behold the forever exploited common men. The volume's feature story, "Thy Kingdom Come" presents three labourers whose dismissal-"the bosses threw them away like a rotten apple"-mirrors their own hopelessness and also intimates the universal disintegration of their class. In the other three dark, raw, unpretentious stories, with the neutral observation of a sociologist, the author speaks up for the impecunious, truculent loud enough to be heard. Brilliantly drawn characters are in each tale as it leisurely winds its way to the inevitable bleak conclusion. There is a gritty authenticity in their tone. In effect, Tar, himself a former factory hand, impresses us as an unsettling portraitist of the destitute, the abandoned and maladjusted.

Poverty is also prevalent in Zsuzsa Vathy's story "I Love You, Edua," a yarn reminiscent of Tar's work with its sinister overtones. This writer of sensitive, resonant prose in which sharp observation often shades into metaphor, knows no condescension to the poor, her whimsical descriptions are indeed mesmerizingly lethal-they hurt. A fine realist, Vathy is freeze-framing the complexities of human relationships with precision, rooted in factual knowledge. In her short piece Edua is a naďve, lonely female executive who, as an experiment, while on vacation, immerses herself into the world of the homeless with dangerous abandon. This captive of the solitary existence of the pseudo corporate world of mini-successes, for a fleeting moment feels loved at last among the homeless. "On the pavement someone had written in neat regular white letters: I LOVE YOU, EDUA! The words transported her high above the square, above the linden trees... her heart beat rapidly in alarm and in exultant joy." Who is more miserable in the long run: the poor little rich girl or the destitute derelicts? Vathy is a honest story-teller, her intrinsic purity breaks through the filth and beams triumphantly on the cutting edge of fiction and reality.

The collection is a welcome sign, a tiny indication that we might be breaking out of our long-lasting literary isolation. The photographs are excellent, the biographical information useful though a bit inconsistent (for instance, Spiró's English translations are missing, among them one by this reviewer), and despite a few silly typos (Getz and not Betz Foundation, etc.) the layout is more than adequate. In sum, the release of this confident, fine English text should be hailed as an enticing calling card from contemporary Hungarian writing.