Of course, Lipót Braun was right when he said that what is lost is lost forever. But (and it’s just that): what does it mean to lose something? Does it mean that it has disappeared and is no more, that it was swallowed by the earth; or does it only mean that we don’t see it any longer? And if we don’t see it, do we even miss it?
Verse and pop music may not seem the most compatible partnership imaginable, but their long romance has spawned a number of love-children for the benefit of Hungarian radio listeners and music fans.
It is not the extraordinary events of an extraordinary age that make Andrea Tompa’s novel a really good piece of writing. No doubt it is easier to work with first-class material and the life of Kolozsvár (Cluj, Romania) before 1989 is excellent subject matter (while from almost every other point of view it was, of course, a disaster).
Critics are rather divided over Péter Nádas’s new work Siren Song, a play written on commission from Germany. This is little wonder as we are talking about a truly odd post-dramatic textual construct – a crude apocalypse, a crazy post-modernist death dance of Western civilization.
