...

That both stories begin admirably few will deny. Without the waste of a word we find ourselves at once in the heart of the situation. We seem to be settling in for a fairly long and absorbing narrative, and then, the point is pressed home by a shock. The outcome of the duel is unexpected. Note how masterful the telling is, how each sentence is measured, each image filled, how the inner world of the Colonel and the journalist gains from the robustness of the outer, the atmosphere of the Gray Arabian, how beauty and horror twined together worm their way into the depths of the unconscious—still we must own that something remains unaccounted for. One has to admit that this author, writing swiftly and with spontaneity, has conquered. As the Colonel’s fate suggests, death may find any of us unprepared.        

Mihály Szegedy-Maszák
is Professor and Chair of Comparative Literature at Eötvös Loránd University and Professor of Central Eurasian Studies at Indiana University. He is the author of Literary Canons: National and International (2001), twelve books in Hungarian (among them monographs on Zsigmond Kemény, Sándor Márai and Géza Ottlik) and editor-in-chief of a three-volume history of Hungarian literature (2007) and the journal Hungarian Studies. His most recent books are Szó, kép, zene (2007, on literature and the other arts) and Megértés, fordítás, kánon (2008, on cultural globalization).