Summary
Krisztian Grecso: Welcome
For seven years, Gergely Gallér had no connection with his village. He had just started working as a librarian in a small town when, on his twenty-third birthday, a friend called him and told him he had to return to Sáraság because Klein's diary had become available. The hero has no choice but to travel to his village in the Great Plain, in a difficult Hungarian province, because as a fourteen-year-old he was one of the founders of the "Ede Klein" Society, one of the chosen few. The return brings him back to adolescence and growing up in the early eighties, at a time when everything was different, when unusual events in the village were lined up like on a tape, and Gergely began to suspect that the small mysterious Jewish merchant Ede Klein is actually his father. Welcome! is an unusual story about growing up in a rural environment full of refined eroticism, magical realism, pagan customs and Jewish mysticism.
Interwoven with fine references to Ferenc Molnár, Magda Szabó and George Orwell, the novel Welcome! tells about love and hate, sexuality, alcoholism and communism from a boy's perspective. Krisztián Grecsó, one of the most interesting contemporary younger Hungarian novelists, in his debut novel talks about the complex relations between the minority and the majority in a new and unusual way.
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