Summary
Andrej Nikolaidis: The Hungarian Sentence
All good stories are at least ambiguous due to lack of evidence, remembers the narrator of The Hungarian Sentence as told by his friend Joe, the central character of the novel by Andrej Nikolaidis, who in one sentence wrote the least ambiguous story, characterized by irony towards the plagues of today and the self-irony to which the writers of "our" language were rarely prone.
Written in the form of an unfinished e-mail that the cynical narrator, a foreigner, sends to her lover, this gothic novella takes us to contemporary Višegrad. It is clear, both in the title and in the text, building an ironic counterpoint to Andrić, that Nikolaidis does not offer us the heroic past, but the criminal present of the famous bridge. On it and around it walk rapists, murderers, incinerators of living people, whose bloody legacy cannot be covered by the colorful facade of Andrićgrad. Evil in this novel, as in the past of this ruined city on the Drina, simply wins. The heroine will not escape the fate of the Visegrad Bosniaks. Moreover, he will learn everything about the past through his skin and his body.
Biblos Newsletter
New titles, special copies and quiet recommendations from the antiquarian bookshop.