Born in 1976, and so among the youngest writers in Hungary today, Noémi Szécsi had her debut novel published in 2002.

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Communist Monte Cristo sets down Hungarians’ shared story (that of their immediate predecessors, whether parents, grandparents or great-grandparents) of their country’s terrible history during the twentieth century, as if from a distorting mirror. It indiscriminately mocks the mythic events and personae created by successive political propaganda machines, who to the present day, like it or not, still determine the way Hungarians think: the Communist martyr, the Communist mass murderer, the White terrorist, the anti-Semitic army officer, Béla Kun, the bourgeois-devouring Communist leader in 1919, Miklós Horthy and his entry into Budapest at the end of 1919 riding a white horse, the assimilant Jew of the upper middle-class, the cultured representative of the Christian middle class, the Hungarian Nazi Arrow Cross janitor, the soldier of the liberating Red Army, the soldier of the Red Army that went on to occupy the country amidst widespread rape and pillage, the officer of Rákosi’s barbarously cruel secret police, the counterrevolutionary who threatens the pseudo-democratic state, and the national hero who fights against Communist dictatorship.
The protagonist of Communist Monte Cristo is searching for an identity. He does not know who his father is and has no memories of family life to fall back on. He even drifts into the Communist movement almost by chance and stumbles into a mess of extravagantly overblown figures and chillingly grotesque situations. The sole dependable point is the calculating vileness which dogs Sanyi, cropping up from time to time in the form of Józsi.
The novel is ferociously witty and entertaining throughout, due in no small part to the epigraphs at the head of each chapter, which are a cavalcade of quotations from momentous and less than momentous, well-known and now largely forgotten texts of political mythopoeia. Still, the tone of the novel gradually darkens as it goes on. In the three main parts into which the book is divided it is by turns cheerful, sad and painfully sardonic. Only as one of the guiltless victims of the reprisals which follow the crushing of the Revolution does Sanyi begin to understand what is really going on around him: how the man-made monsters of political myths come to life, then how they engulf precisely those for whom these myths promised to define their own identities.
This novel did not attract the critical attention that it deserved. Maybe Noémi Szécsi’s view of history was just too hard to digest in a country where, instead of a process of dealing with the traumatic events of the past from several angles, we still have the competition of simplified rival versions of history. It did not help that it was brought out by a small publisher not known primarily for literary works.

In any event, in the autumn of 2009, not long after her third novel came out, Noémi Szécsi was one of 12 writers first awarded the European Prize for Literature by the EU, specifically for Communist Monte Cristo. This will hopefully earn it retrospective attention.

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Born in 1961 and hitherto seen mainly as a poet, István Kemény aroused major expectations when his second novel came out. One of the key Hungarian writers of his generation, he is a thoroughgoing “literary” man, and an influential representative of a poetry that makes no aesthetic concessions to the reader.
Dear Unknown comprehensively changes what people think of his oeuvre. It is a carefully thought out, cunningly structured novel with an almost impossibly fast pace. The narrator, Tamás Krizsán, relates how he grew up. The plot as such revolves around a St Nicholas Day party held jointly by the State Corvinus Library and the Institute of Encyclopaedia Editors (both invented institutions), who are responsible for assembling a multivolume Great Hungarian Encyclopaedia in the early 1980s. The library is home to many odd characters, a place where lifelong loves and friendships are formed (and also ended). The most important of these for Tamás are the two young intellectuals of similar age, Gábor Kender and Kornél Hajnal (a few years later the latter will become Central Europe’s “living conscience”). At every turn, however, the narrator breaks off telling the story to jump back in time and relate in detail crucial events from his teenage years. Apart from Buda, an important second site for the plot, both magical and mysterious, is the fictitious village of Nyék on the Danube bank, which belongs to the catchment area of Greater Budapest. This is where Tamás lives with his parents and two older sisters. It is from there that they go to the capital to celebrate family holidays at the home of Tamás’s semiretired Uncle Lajos and his wife.
A central category for Dear Unknown is the secret, or in the novel’s overarching metaphor, the Big Narrative. At the back of the strictly choreographed family rows hover various unspoken and unspeakable secrets. The fates of certain figures (in themselves mysterious) are obscurely connected with each other. Present events are explained by events in the past, but that sense still lies in the future and for those who are in the know. The initiation ceremony is conducted by the Masters: Uncle Lajos, the repository of all family secrets; ‘Uncle’ Olbach, the director of the Corvinus Library and incidentally also one of Nyék’s inhabitants and the grandfather of Tamás’s wife-to-be; and Mr Patai, teacher and a part-time employee of the Institute of Encyclopaedia Editors, the Devil incarnate, who enters into contracts with his students laying claim to the students’ souls in exchange for explaining to them the world’s otherwise puzzling system of connections (he is a Master for Tamás and his two friends).