August 2009 Archives

Cold Days by Tibor Cseres

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Tibor Cseres is a Hungarian author. I bought this book in English translation from an excellent book store in Budapest, Hungary, and it is apparently not available on Amazon.com. This is a chilling fictionalization about some of the atrocities committed by Hungary during WWII.

From Cseres' obituary:

It evoked the massacre of Serbs, Jews and politically 'suspect' Hungarians which took place in 1942 at Novi Sad in Yugoslavia, an atrocity for which the responsibility fell not only on the commanding officers with Fascist leanings, but on those Hungarian soldiers and gendarmes who 'just carried out orders' and, by implication, on the passivity and the moral inertia of Hungarian society

I don't want to reduce it to its subject, however. It's also a very interesting and oddly-structured book with a Sarte-esque premise.

Apparently this book was featured on "Lost", but don't let that stop you from reading it.

I toiled with this book for years, an off an on affair, a love that hurt me but wouldn't leave me. It was--dare I say it--my white whale. (I shouldn't have said it.) My twitter feed spent a short while devoted to whale quotes. It was brilliantly written, incredibly moving, I loved it, and I am glad to move on.

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