Nándor Gion was born in Vojvodina in 1941. This is a region just beyond Hungary's southern border. When the Austro-Hungarian Empire fell apart this region became part of the Kingdom of Serbia, was briefly again part of Hungary during the Second World War, to belong to the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia after the War.

Then after Yugoslavia crumbled in the 1990s Vojvodina was once again inside a country called Serbia, this time a republic. Vojvodina has been rich in Hungarian contemporary prose writers, apart from Gion, Ottó Tolnai, László Végel, Attila Balázs, Péter Bozsik and Ferenc Kontra should be mentioned.

First published in 1973, the first of the quartet, Virágos katona (Soldier-with- Flower: see the chapter translated on pp. 43–60 of this issue of HQ), is perhaps the best known of Gion's novels. It is a totally unnostalgic portrait of life in the Monarchy (the story opens in 1898). Serbs, Hungarians and ethnic Germans live in separate districts of a large village, not mixing and yet unavoidably belonging together. The two main characters, 'Gimpy' Ádám Török and 'Tatty' István Gallai, the former a stubborn, self-willed, hot-tempered, adroit, selfish, everresourceful man,

as opposed to the gentle, music-making (zither-playing) Tatty Gallai. They spend part of their time up on Calvary Hill from which they can gaze down on the village. Fourteen columns of white stone lead up the hill, and into every column is set a large picture depicting the tormenting and crucifixion of Jesus Christ. One curious figure is a smiling Roman soldier wearing a flower. The Great War then breaks out, as if Jesus's scourgers and tormentors had taken over the world and not the smiling Soldier-with-Flower.

András Cserna-Szabó was born in 1974 and has now published his sixth book a collection of loosely connected short stories. He is a witty, light-hearted,

coolly ironic and highly imaginative storyteller. In places that lightness of touch verges on the downright crude, at times on the morbidly grotesque.

Everything is grotesque (the unhappy knife-thrower is the one called Alfred the Blade, while a magic spell for healing runs: "A shark which feeds from the palm of your hand will do so from the sole of your foot; a shark which feeds from the palm of your hand will do so from the sole of your foot..."). This is no philosophic grotesque, one inclined to be satirical—more something flippant, almost frivolous. Nor is it, however, the frivolity Aladár Schöpflin, literary critic of the prewar periodical Nyugat wished for

If only we had a truly good frivolous writer, but the frivolous ones are all rotten, the truly good ones, all serious—deadly serious.

A touch pompously virtuous at heart, just like you. It seems a little country can only have weak or, at most, mediocre frivolous writers, but perish the thought that anyone should ever be a true, dauntlessly, utterly frivolous writer. A pity.

No, not that kind of flippancy; a cooler, less serious, more alcohol-fuelled type. Not that it leaves a hangover. If you read a story in the evening, you'll find it easier, come morning, to look out of the window onto whatever town you happen to live in. That's because all our towns resemble Cserna-Szabó's town of Snogshop. Or perhaps they don't at all.

More than one reviewer of the book by Noémi Kiss (also b. 1974) has made reference to E. T. A. Hoffmann's Nathaniel in "The Sandman", who is drawn towards the unknown by an irresistible force. The parallel is suggested by the quote used as the book's epigraph:

Perhaps there does exist a dark power which fastens on to us and leads us off along a dangerous and ruinous path which we would otherwise not have trodden; but if so, this power must have assumed within us the form of ourselves, indeed have become ourselves...*

The resemblance between the Hoffmannesque character and Noémi Kiss's protagonist would still hold even without that epigraph, though. Noémi Kiss herself is fond of launching into unknown territory, not only in her stories, adventurous and strange in scale, or even stranger in perspective as they are, but also frequently setting off in her articles and essays, with landscape breaking into the writing without fail, even in the doctoral dissertation that she wrote on Paul Celan or the journals that she has kept on the cultural anthropology of Central and Eastern Europe.