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Opsada 13
U decembru 1944.godine Crvena armija je ušla u Budimpeštu čime je otpočela jedna od najkrvavijih opsada u Drugom svetskom ratu. Opsada se završila u februaru sledeće godine, ali se njene posledice osećaju decenijama posle toga.
Opsada 13 je inteligentan, emotivan i virtuozan ciklus priča o ratu, porodici, odanosti, ljubavi i iskupljenju koji je napisao jedan od najboljih kanadskih autora i svetski priznati pisac kratkih priča.
* * *
„Poput Nabokova, Tamaš Dobozi spaja najbolje elemente evropskog i američkog načina pripovedanja.“
David Albahari
* * *
„Nemoguće je preživeti Opsadu, kao što je nisu preživeli ni Hektor, ni Ahilej, pa ni Uliks. Onaj koji je doplovio na obale Itake – kao što će Dobozijevi junaci doploviti u Kanadu – nije više taj čovek. Neko drugi se iskrcao na sanjano ostrvo, neko čiji je život ispražnjen od smisla. Utvara neka.“
Milenko Bodirogić
Opsada 13 je inteligentan, emotivan i virtuozan ciklus priča o ratu, porodici, odanosti, ljubavi i iskupljenju koji je napisao jedan od najboljih kanadskih autora i svetski priznati pisac kratkih priča.
* * *
„Poput Nabokova, Tamaš Dobozi spaja najbolje elemente evropskog i američkog načina pripovedanja.“
David Albahari
* * *
„Nemoguće je preživeti Opsadu, kao što je nisu preživeli ni Hektor, ni Ahilej, pa ni Uliks. Onaj koji je doplovio na obale Itake – kao što će Dobozijevi junaci doploviti u Kanadu – nije više taj čovek. Neko drugi se iskrcao na sanjano ostrvo, neko čiji je život ispražnjen od smisla. Utvara neka.“
Milenko Bodirogić
266 pages, Paperback
First published September 11, 2012
16 people are currently reading
546 people want to read
About the author
Tamas Dobozy
20 books20 followersTamas Dobozy was born in Nanaimo, BC. After receiving his Ph.D. in English from the University of British Columbia, he taught at Memorial University. His work has been published in journals throughout North America, and in 1995 he won the annual subTerrain short fiction contest. When X Equals Marylou, his first collection of short fiction, was shortlisted for the Danuta Gleed Award. Tamas Dobozy now teaches in the Department of English and Film Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 52 reviews
April 17, 2020
Despite 5 stars this isn't generally a type of book for re-read and few years back it was just a book, albeit a great one but lately as I dug through old memories I found parallels with my own experience of city in siege and how it affected my family, especially my father. Now it's more than a week since my father died and memories become even more vivid re-read seemed like natural option and I prefer to dig through the wounds while they are fresh than to reopen once they healed. It's a subtle book where war and siege creates cracks where life pours in and creates deep holes. Holes that span through life and spills into other generations.
Overall it was 5 stars when it was not "just a book" and it's 5 stars now. It's great short story collection any way you look at it.
Overall it was 5 stars when it was not "just a book" and it's 5 stars now. It's great short story collection any way you look at it.
September 11, 2014
Tamas Dobozy has this unsettling way of articulating exactly what I'm thinking -- usually some half-formed thought about my own personal hangups or idiosyncrasies -- and he does it way too well to be unintentional. Not that I think he's writing directly for me -- rather that I think he is tapping into a zeitgeist, specifically a Canadian one, that few authors hit quite so subtly, quite so bravely.
After all, these stories are about sieges.
Physical ones; none more prevalent than the siege of Budapest in 1944, though the safe and horrifying walls of villas and zoos and emigre city clubs fill the pages. Personal ones; your family holding you in or holding you down, you holding yourself in to keep your family happy or at bay. Psychological ones. Emotional ones. I have never read a series of stories more claustrophobic, more trapped.
But through all of these are escape attempts: alcohol, sex, artifice. Doomsday devices. Love.
No one said they were good escape attempts.
But the hope of freedom, somehow, is enough, here. And it's not cheesy, or eye-roll-worthy, or frustrating, or even remotely obvious. It is hidden between intricately-constructed layers of quotidian drama spiked with surrealism, carefully slipped between sentences that alternate between terse and breathless. Some stories slip to the background ("The Miracles of Saint Marx") and others rush forward ("The Beautician," "The Atlas of B. Gorbe"), but they are all knife-diggers, and none describes the collection's sentiment better than the haunting "Sailor's Mouth":
Beautiful indeed.
After all, these stories are about sieges.
Physical ones; none more prevalent than the siege of Budapest in 1944, though the safe and horrifying walls of villas and zoos and emigre city clubs fill the pages. Personal ones; your family holding you in or holding you down, you holding yourself in to keep your family happy or at bay. Psychological ones. Emotional ones. I have never read a series of stories more claustrophobic, more trapped.
But through all of these are escape attempts: alcohol, sex, artifice. Doomsday devices. Love.
No one said they were good escape attempts.
But the hope of freedom, somehow, is enough, here. And it's not cheesy, or eye-roll-worthy, or frustrating, or even remotely obvious. It is hidden between intricately-constructed layers of quotidian drama spiked with surrealism, carefully slipped between sentences that alternate between terse and breathless. Some stories slip to the background ("The Miracles of Saint Marx") and others rush forward ("The Beautician," "The Atlas of B. Gorbe"), but they are all knife-diggers, and none describes the collection's sentiment better than the haunting "Sailor's Mouth":
"She thought it was just a question of erasing the maps," he said, "and she'd find herself once more in that place from which she'd started out. I mean when she'd started," he corrected himself, "before she'd discovered anything of the world." He came close to the glass to look at it with me. "It's beautiful," he said.
"It is," I replied. And it was, like some transcript of dreams, written days later, when all you remember is the faintest of traces, a world already gone before it registered. (64)
Beautiful indeed.
November 12, 2012
"Siege 13" has been awarded the 2012 Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize in Canada, underlining just how excellent this book of short stories is. Built around one of the many horrific events of World War Two -- the longterm blockade and starvation of Budapest as the Soviet Army drove westward -- this is not just a book about the viciousness of war, it is also a probing of how one harrowing experience can shape a country and its people throughout the years as the impact of a period of grim agony plays out among survivors and their children.
The thirteen stories that Tamas Dobozy writes are all darkened by the siege and its memories, though only two of them actually take place during the struggle itself ("The Animals of the Budapest Zoo, 1944-45" and "The Restoration of the Villa where Tibor Kalman Once Lived.") Other stories trace the closed-in characters of siege survivors (such as "Rosewood Queens," ) the survival skills that people were forced to develop (such as "The Beautician,") and the way that further generations were shaped by their parents' grief and pain (such as "The Selected Mug Shots of Famous Hungarian Assassins.")
It can, of course, easily be concluded that a book of stories about a grim episode in Hungarian history, no matter how horrific, would normally not resonate deeply in North America. So what makes "Siege 13" special is not so much its subject matter as the high quality of the writing.
The characters in these stories are indelible -- sharply etched and superbly presented. Short stories often lack the depth in characterization that a novel can develop over its full length. But Dobozy avoids that problem. Partly that is because the narrator is often a common thread in the stories, with a rueful personal perspective that ties much of the book together. Certain characters (such as Maria, one of the raped women from the siege) appear in several stories, struggling to come to terms with her victimization and her survival. Mostly, though, Dobozy's effectiveness rests on the pointed details with which he brings his characters alive -- right from Benedek Gorbe, "with his stubble, pants the size of garbage bags, half-smouldering cigars," in the first story, to Otto Kovacs, "looking indescribably old, worn out, broken, a tattered black overcoat hanging off his bony shoulders," in the last.
These character descriptions are just one part of the excellence of Dobozy's writing. The human relationships traced in such stories as "The Atlas of B. Gorbe" and "The Society of Friends" are complex and compelling. The analysis of betrayal and loyalty is intricate and multi-layered in "The Beautician," where a striving graduate student must decide whether to reveal an older man's ambivalent past, even as he is himself trying to sort out his changing ties with a young lover. There is even a wicked comic edge to such stories as "The Miracles of Saint Marx," where a labour camp escapee survives by discovering "Das Kapital" is nourishing to eat!
"Siege 13" is, in many ways, a symbol of the new world in which we live -- where genocide and destruction anywhere set off changes that echo across many countries and through the generations. In that sense, this book is brother to the Vietnam novels of Lam and Thuy, to the novels about Rwanda extermination, to the Boyden and Richler novels about war and its impact on aboriginal Canada and immigrant Montreal. What is striking about these short stories is the way they permit that harsh process to be perceived from so many angles and with such depth of feeling.
Thus "Siege 13" is a universal story, despite the intricate detail on the Budapest tragedy. It is about stubborn survival, not always very heroic, with huge human costs, sometimes accompanied by compromise, but enduring and ultimately powerful.
The thirteen stories that Tamas Dobozy writes are all darkened by the siege and its memories, though only two of them actually take place during the struggle itself ("The Animals of the Budapest Zoo, 1944-45" and "The Restoration of the Villa where Tibor Kalman Once Lived.") Other stories trace the closed-in characters of siege survivors (such as "Rosewood Queens," ) the survival skills that people were forced to develop (such as "The Beautician,") and the way that further generations were shaped by their parents' grief and pain (such as "The Selected Mug Shots of Famous Hungarian Assassins.")
It can, of course, easily be concluded that a book of stories about a grim episode in Hungarian history, no matter how horrific, would normally not resonate deeply in North America. So what makes "Siege 13" special is not so much its subject matter as the high quality of the writing.
The characters in these stories are indelible -- sharply etched and superbly presented. Short stories often lack the depth in characterization that a novel can develop over its full length. But Dobozy avoids that problem. Partly that is because the narrator is often a common thread in the stories, with a rueful personal perspective that ties much of the book together. Certain characters (such as Maria, one of the raped women from the siege) appear in several stories, struggling to come to terms with her victimization and her survival. Mostly, though, Dobozy's effectiveness rests on the pointed details with which he brings his characters alive -- right from Benedek Gorbe, "with his stubble, pants the size of garbage bags, half-smouldering cigars," in the first story, to Otto Kovacs, "looking indescribably old, worn out, broken, a tattered black overcoat hanging off his bony shoulders," in the last.
These character descriptions are just one part of the excellence of Dobozy's writing. The human relationships traced in such stories as "The Atlas of B. Gorbe" and "The Society of Friends" are complex and compelling. The analysis of betrayal and loyalty is intricate and multi-layered in "The Beautician," where a striving graduate student must decide whether to reveal an older man's ambivalent past, even as he is himself trying to sort out his changing ties with a young lover. There is even a wicked comic edge to such stories as "The Miracles of Saint Marx," where a labour camp escapee survives by discovering "Das Kapital" is nourishing to eat!
"Siege 13" is, in many ways, a symbol of the new world in which we live -- where genocide and destruction anywhere set off changes that echo across many countries and through the generations. In that sense, this book is brother to the Vietnam novels of Lam and Thuy, to the novels about Rwanda extermination, to the Boyden and Richler novels about war and its impact on aboriginal Canada and immigrant Montreal. What is striking about these short stories is the way they permit that harsh process to be perceived from so many angles and with such depth of feeling.
Thus "Siege 13" is a universal story, despite the intricate detail on the Budapest tragedy. It is about stubborn survival, not always very heroic, with huge human costs, sometimes accompanied by compromise, but enduring and ultimately powerful.
October 10, 2013
The short story craft at its best. These interconnected stories explore the horrors of the fall of Budapest to the Red Army during WWII and the impacts of the resulting Hungarian diaspora on subsequent generations, a topic I am embarrassed to say I knew little about until this book. Dobozy presents this dark subject with great beauty through multiple character perspectives on the impossible choices humans must make in war times and the stories they tell themselves to survive. "The Beautician," told midway through the collection, is one of the most perfect short stories I've ever read.
March 30, 2023
I am going to admit I did not read all of the stories, but 3 stars for me generally indicates that I think the book is decent but it isn't exactly to my tastes and I am unlikely to buy it/keep it or read it again.
This is how I feel about this one: the stories I read were good, but I was never compelled enough by the book as a whole to read them all before it had to go back to the library after a couple renewal cycles. Still, I wouldn't hesitate to read more of his stories, and do think they're well done.
This is how I feel about this one: the stories I read were good, but I was never compelled enough by the book as a whole to read them all before it had to go back to the library after a couple renewal cycles. Still, I wouldn't hesitate to read more of his stories, and do think they're well done.
September 20, 2018
This has a lot of emotional weight – all the stories were very textbook short story, in that they created a tiny, encapsulated emotional world and many of them ended in an epiphany. But – and there's always a but with me – I felt that first, there was too much similarity of theme and second, and more important, that there was a certain lack of compassion for his characters.
He creates sad people – people who know they're sad; people who don't and find out over the course of the story; people who write elaborate fictions to conceal the fact that they're sad from themselves and others. So what's the problem? You can write sad characters in sympathy, because you're a sad person, and you want to show that there's a little sadness and self-delusion in all of us, or you can write them as a voyeur, to peek into sad little lives as though through the windows of a dollhouse, or to show the reader that they aren't like the characters, to make the reader feel better, because they're not delusional in the way that a boy creating doomsday machines because he can't handle his parents' divorce is.
And it's true that a lot of them are about showing that a lot of self-conception is self-delusion, which is necessary – "It was nice for you, for a while, thinking differently about yourself?" Father Szent-Mihály asks in "The Miracles of Saint Marx," even though it was because of a lie he told. But there's always that sense that Dobozy doesn't feel it himself.
As to similarity of theme, Dobozy does very well writing stories that are about being an immigrant in a way that aren't explicitly about being an immigrant, even when the main characters are immigrants. What I mean is that feeling like you're the loose tooth in an otherwise perfect row (too smart; too dumb; just not the same; missing something; feeling displaced in what should be home) isn't a uniquely immigrant experience, though being an immigrant can exacerbate it, and Dobozy made me feel that intensely.
But all of them are about that or about the stories people tell about themselves or both, so the collection as a whole feels tonally monotone. Do we need all of these stories? At almost 350 pages, it's a fairly long collection and doesn't need padding. I'm not sorry I read all of them, but it does feel like a surfeit, especially since incidents seem to repeat across stories.
If you can ignore worries about his compassion, and if you spread your reading out a lot, though, it's very good. His prose is beautiful, and his insights into people's minds and relationships are cutting and real. I just wish there had been a little more selectivity, so that the discontent wouldn't have had time to brew and ferment.
He creates sad people – people who know they're sad; people who don't and find out over the course of the story; people who write elaborate fictions to conceal the fact that they're sad from themselves and others. So what's the problem? You can write sad characters in sympathy, because you're a sad person, and you want to show that there's a little sadness and self-delusion in all of us, or you can write them as a voyeur, to peek into sad little lives as though through the windows of a dollhouse, or to show the reader that they aren't like the characters, to make the reader feel better, because they're not delusional in the way that a boy creating doomsday machines because he can't handle his parents' divorce is.
And it's true that a lot of them are about showing that a lot of self-conception is self-delusion, which is necessary – "It was nice for you, for a while, thinking differently about yourself?" Father Szent-Mihály asks in "The Miracles of Saint Marx," even though it was because of a lie he told. But there's always that sense that Dobozy doesn't feel it himself.
As to similarity of theme, Dobozy does very well writing stories that are about being an immigrant in a way that aren't explicitly about being an immigrant, even when the main characters are immigrants. What I mean is that feeling like you're the loose tooth in an otherwise perfect row (too smart; too dumb; just not the same; missing something; feeling displaced in what should be home) isn't a uniquely immigrant experience, though being an immigrant can exacerbate it, and Dobozy made me feel that intensely.
But all of them are about that or about the stories people tell about themselves or both, so the collection as a whole feels tonally monotone. Do we need all of these stories? At almost 350 pages, it's a fairly long collection and doesn't need padding. I'm not sorry I read all of them, but it does feel like a surfeit, especially since incidents seem to repeat across stories.
If you can ignore worries about his compassion, and if you spread your reading out a lot, though, it's very good. His prose is beautiful, and his insights into people's minds and relationships are cutting and real. I just wish there had been a little more selectivity, so that the discontent wouldn't have had time to brew and ferment.
April 30, 2013
An amazing collection of dysfunctional weirdness. What recurs throughout these harrowing stories are the ways in which people everywhere are subjected to terrible actions and, if they survive, struggle to find a way to forget, remember, and/or integrate the things they've experienced, seen done to others, or done themselves. How they've been forced to make decisions none of us should have to make.
It's a brutally honest collection about the ways we create a narrative that will sustain us - whether it's Hungary, Rwanda, or Bosnia apocalypse is always here and now somewhere in the world. And rape is a universal weapon of war designed to sustain that apocalypse - something that is perhaps finally being recognized for what it is. Bravo to Dobozy for bringing this to the forefront in a way that addresses the damage done without sensationalizing it. And, yes, there's the writing. Wonderful!
It's a brutally honest collection about the ways we create a narrative that will sustain us - whether it's Hungary, Rwanda, or Bosnia apocalypse is always here and now somewhere in the world. And rape is a universal weapon of war designed to sustain that apocalypse - something that is perhaps finally being recognized for what it is. Bravo to Dobozy for bringing this to the forefront in a way that addresses the damage done without sensationalizing it. And, yes, there's the writing. Wonderful!
November 11, 2013
Siege 13, by Tamas Dobozy, is a highly intelligent and carefully crafted collection of stories about the elusive nature of truth as it applies to human experience. The final paragraph of “Days of Orphans and Strangers” is about as close to a perfect ending as you’ll find in a story. This is a very fine collection.
November 3, 2014
This collection of thirteen stories revolve around the siege of Hungary at the end of WW2. Some deal with childhood recollections, some with dealing with the trauma in relatives, and some with the actual events as they were happening. It's not light topic, but the writing is excellent.
December 20, 2024
Reading Tamas Dobozy recently has been like hearing the chime of an antique clock in a crowded internet cafe. With an unsettling resonance and narrative force, he borrows from the essay, travelogue, testimony and biography to render fictions for the 21st century. His most recent short story collections, Ghost Geographies: Fictions (2021) and Siege 13: Stories (2012) are linked masterpieces of displacement. The characters negotiate the frenzy of contemporary life often burdened by memories of the postwar hardships of Stalinism and revolution. Even after utopian dreams or personal careerism collapse, they carry on in the New World as obsessive, striving, and relentless as ants. Dobozy’s goal seems to be to create a necessary literature, unique, fresh, and alive–whose characters are rendered by a Modernist style and realist detail. His fiction embodies the malleability and possibilities of contemporary short fiction, an encouraging alternative and sweet relief from so many stale collections of recent years. Instead of predictable psychologizing, autofiction, or dull arcs and woebegone plots that belong more in the arena of local journalism than gripping literature, Dobozy’s fictions are deliciously weird.
He could be described as a historian of ghosts, or a biographer of shadows. In his imaginative landscapes, haunted Hungarian emigres and con men with murky pasts, who have escaped wars or thwarted revolutions arrive in the quiet towns of Canada (and in some rare cases vice versa.) Hungary is in a whittled down landlocked state the size of Indiana but the memories and internal rivalries could cover the continent. Dobozy’s characters have survived the siege, famine, and subsequent displacement in Canada only to grapple with new generational conflicts in a strange land.
Dobozy is a literature professor at Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario. Ghost Geographies, his most recent collection, builds upon his equally compelling companion collection, Siege 13. His unmistakable style includes a knack for surreal images and odd juxtapositions. Characters vividly drawn in Siege 13 reappear in Ghost Geographies in borrowed robes, reborn in the conspiracy of silence after the brutal Siege of Budapest, 1944-45. Some characters climb into burnt out homes, assuming new identities like crabs in an abandoned shell. Other characters have mysterious doubles. Yet everyone seems preoccupied by their own obsessions as false mirrors and trapdoors hide what little may be knowable about them. In a delicious bit of dramatic irony, characters may not know a colleague or lover was once a secret policewoman or an informant back in Hungary (something we learned two stories ago). Few characters resolve their problems or even speak of them outright, waiting for the return of the repressed past as plots and motives tangle.
In the Ghost Geographies story “The Rise and Rise and Rise of Thomas Sargis,” a stooge apologist of the regime travels to Communist Hungary, flattered by the apparatchiks and bewitched by a secret police agent. He witnesses the moribund bureaucracy and his own self-delusions destroy his life until he finds a path of return to Canada, playing the part of his own ghost. Having been tossed aside by the regime and a witness to the end of Communism, Sargis discovers his former fiancé in Canada decades after his abandonment. She does not recognize the bearded old ruin he has become. It is too late. He is a man out of time. One of Dobozy’s skills, seen in this story, is his understanding of old forms of writing, a challenge to the contemporary “slice of life” style. Instead of a snippet, a reader can follow an entire life lived in the sequence of a single tale. In Dobozy’s best pieces, there is a captivating ambiguity to characters caught in history’s torrent. He brings the shattered lives of his Hungarian emigres a special poignancy, especially in the seemingly banal Canadian landscapes. His rendering of these figures is worthy of what Kafka brought to Vienna, or Faulkner to Mississippi.
In Dobozy’s earlier collection Last Notes and Other Stories (2005), the artist György Ferene is a precursor to many later Dobozian types. He is a doomed figure, a modern myth, fated to repeatedly paint blank canvases that are foolishly praised by clueless critics. The absurdity of his success is born of his inability to connect. In contrast to the maxim “happiness writes white,” György’s misery paints blank but ironically slips into a Modernist groove that brings him fame yet shatters his relationship with his most dutiful son. Many characters in these stories are “swallowed” by their contempt for their new host countries. Their children struggle between the two worlds.
In the Last Notes story “Four Uncles,” a daughter, Krisztina, laments at his funeral that she never really had a father. “He was never really here,” she says of the old buzzard. “I think history ended for him the moment he left Hungary. I don’t know what kinds of truths they had then, but it seemed like he held on to them long after they’d become the worst kind of lies.” For the immigrant, seemingly safe and settled Canada can be a cheerless dead zone, acid for one’s dissolving identity.
Other emigres bring with them a European narcissism and Hungarian machismo, private specters that haunt them into their own graves. In Ghost Geographies, “Crosswords” is a story about the anger and in-fighting (the “cross” words) of emigre Hungarians for one another. “Canada is your home!” Hank, an emigre to Canada, shouts, soliciting door-to-door for a donation to one of the local Hungarian citizen groups in 1984. Feri, also an emigre, responds, “Canada is my prison! Canada is the place you forced me to live in. The place filled with my dead wife. The place I keep coming back to whenever I visit Hungary and realize I don’t belong there anymore, the country went on without me. When you people forced me out you forced me out forever!”
For Dobozy’s displaced characters, the past lingers within. Characters grapple in new settings often slipping into nostalgia and alienation, “a darkness so deep it was empty even of dreams.” In Ghost Geographies the story “Spires,” follows Paul, Maris, and their children escaping Hungary’s 1956 Revolution. The family finds themselves a world away, near Stillwater Bay on the west coast of Canada (where Dobozy himself grew up). The couple know that the relatives they left behind will be tormented by the Communist authorities, punished for their freedom. The Canadian wilderness is a blank for them, a company town with bad schools filled with “Indians and rednecks” to whom they feel superior. “I’m so tired of escaping,” Paul tells his wife. Then, like an artist, from a detritus of beer cans in a lumberman’s shack, Maris begins to recreate Hungary for her children out of garbage. She reconstructs the chain bridge over the Danube. With more cans and trash “she’d build the white towers, fine as fish bones, of the parliament buildings. Then Saint Stephen’s Basilica. The Academy of Sciences. The kids were helping now, fishing cans out of the cupboards, carrying them to her. Maris went on to describe the city as if they were walking through it.”
Dobozy’s style in his two recent collections resemble the unsettledness of Canadian short story writer and Paris emigre, Mavis Gallant. Like her, there are recurring characters and a stylistic lushness in the winding diamondback of vivid almost musical description as in “In Siege 13’s “The Animals of the Budapest Zoo.” It is a story about two friends hiding out in a derelict zoo during the Budapest bombings, there’s a magical scene where one of the characters begin reanimating the dead animals. In that vivid style reminiscent of Gallant, Dobozy writes: “Of the animals they’d released, a few vultures and eagles remained, circling above the zoo and drifting down lazily to feed on the plentiful carrion in the streets. When they returned to their nests, Sandor would wonder what was more poisonous in their bellies, the flesh of communists or fascists.”
At home in this style of imaginative realism, Dobozy has the evocative strangeness of Steven Milhauser or Curzio Malaparte’s war tales. The landscapes of each collection are littered with ruins, broken frames, torn fabric, old maps, collapsing villas, bogus symphonies, junked-up museums, homemade machines, or “things discarded and forgotten.”
Some conceptual stories in Ghost Geographies, like “Nom de Guerre,” were likely more fun to write than they are to read. They have the cold cleverness of an overloaded flash piece. But other experiments sparkle. “Lester’s Exit” resembles a documentary of interviews—a story without a first-person narrator—but develops slowly like a brightening image on a screen. In it, there are descriptions of images, films, drawings, fragments of confessions and official “documents.” But the reader is left to piece them together for meaning.
Dobozy also seems to adore the subject of the Hungarian swindler. Even before the notorious con artist Victor Lustig sold the Eiffel Tower twice or Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orban, shoveled EU funds to his right-wing nationalist patronage network, Hungary has long been associated with memorable frauds. One protean character in these stories, Oscar Teleki, reappears over the course of Dobozy’s two collections in three stories. He seems to move in and out of his individual life like a crab looking for a new shell. In Siege’s “The Encirclement,” shape-shifting Oscar Teleki is a writer and lecturer. After recreating himself as an interpreter of the Siege of Budapest, Oscar is accused by Sándor Eszterhazy, a seemingly blind scold in the audience (who later reappears in “Ghost Geographies”) of fakery and supporting the fascists. Who is telling the truth? What actually happened to these two survivors of the war? And who is the Oscar who appears in the final iteration, “The New and Improved Oscar Teleki”? Is the “Oscar” we meet simply a fraud who shared a room with the true Oscar? Or did he, like so many of the deracinated of our time, pick up the stories and persona we see around us and fit into a readymade identity, like putting on another person’s clothes? The reader, like the ever-digging narrators, become curious researchers, sifting through old articles, case histories and criminal profiles–invited in by the clues dropped from one story to the next–as we attempt to uncover a truth that may be impossible to uncover.
Throughout the collections, the refugees meet “impossible panoramas,” struggle with “unsettled boundaries,” and cross “unaccountable distances” to survive. Secret manuscripts often appear, or radio antennas—objects to hide and connect people deracinated or with short-circuited social bonds. Generations of characters are explored so Dobozy can deftly move from the ideological rigidity of Stalinism to the uncertainty of our own skeptical times. In each story, layers of ambiguity fog even the most obvious truths. Is one male beautician, layered in make-up, merely pretending to be gay, even decades later, in order to hide his past identity as a secret policeman? Or is his powdered mask sincere?
In Dobozy’s titular story, “Ghost Geographies,” one of the best of the collection, Sándor Eszterhazy dies of cold exposure in his seventies, after spending a lifetime refusing to accept the world’s borders. Sándor spent his life creating an art piece, a kind of map or atlas. He stitched vacant spaces together into this contiguous atlas and these “spectral” maps became real to him. His frozen corpse is discovered in one of the dodgy hostels he made his home along the Fort Erie and Buffalo border. He crossed boundaries and compiled non-places as a personal sham utopia, an obsessive myth-making exercise by compiling a map on “beer coasters, foolscap, the backs of postcards, even the waxy insides of cut and flattened coffee cups.” Lost in his mirage, this individual geography of slotted maps was consolation enough for the loss he had endured. What are the personas we construct on the internet and the bogus expertise we feel in those digital “rabbit holes” we find ourselves lost within but maps of our own making? Sándor is the ghost of our future.
Dobozy’s talent for renewing and then reimagining old forms are powerfully rendered, creating haunted characters attempting to gain footing in unsteady times. Like Sándor, Dobozy seems to be concerned with the disappearance of a perceived identity—the setting, culture, and community that forged us. His stories, like Sándor’s maps, are an artifact for a necessary construction towards connection in a scrambled era. The tragic assemblage of maps and stories is our human need, and the artistic vision for a better world. In an age threatened by grubby demagogues and climate change, Sándor’s work is all of Dobozy’s work itself—a carefully constructed hope, the marvel of the assembled dream.
He could be described as a historian of ghosts, or a biographer of shadows. In his imaginative landscapes, haunted Hungarian emigres and con men with murky pasts, who have escaped wars or thwarted revolutions arrive in the quiet towns of Canada (and in some rare cases vice versa.) Hungary is in a whittled down landlocked state the size of Indiana but the memories and internal rivalries could cover the continent. Dobozy’s characters have survived the siege, famine, and subsequent displacement in Canada only to grapple with new generational conflicts in a strange land.
Dobozy is a literature professor at Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario. Ghost Geographies, his most recent collection, builds upon his equally compelling companion collection, Siege 13. His unmistakable style includes a knack for surreal images and odd juxtapositions. Characters vividly drawn in Siege 13 reappear in Ghost Geographies in borrowed robes, reborn in the conspiracy of silence after the brutal Siege of Budapest, 1944-45. Some characters climb into burnt out homes, assuming new identities like crabs in an abandoned shell. Other characters have mysterious doubles. Yet everyone seems preoccupied by their own obsessions as false mirrors and trapdoors hide what little may be knowable about them. In a delicious bit of dramatic irony, characters may not know a colleague or lover was once a secret policewoman or an informant back in Hungary (something we learned two stories ago). Few characters resolve their problems or even speak of them outright, waiting for the return of the repressed past as plots and motives tangle.
In the Ghost Geographies story “The Rise and Rise and Rise of Thomas Sargis,” a stooge apologist of the regime travels to Communist Hungary, flattered by the apparatchiks and bewitched by a secret police agent. He witnesses the moribund bureaucracy and his own self-delusions destroy his life until he finds a path of return to Canada, playing the part of his own ghost. Having been tossed aside by the regime and a witness to the end of Communism, Sargis discovers his former fiancé in Canada decades after his abandonment. She does not recognize the bearded old ruin he has become. It is too late. He is a man out of time. One of Dobozy’s skills, seen in this story, is his understanding of old forms of writing, a challenge to the contemporary “slice of life” style. Instead of a snippet, a reader can follow an entire life lived in the sequence of a single tale. In Dobozy’s best pieces, there is a captivating ambiguity to characters caught in history’s torrent. He brings the shattered lives of his Hungarian emigres a special poignancy, especially in the seemingly banal Canadian landscapes. His rendering of these figures is worthy of what Kafka brought to Vienna, or Faulkner to Mississippi.
In Dobozy’s earlier collection Last Notes and Other Stories (2005), the artist György Ferene is a precursor to many later Dobozian types. He is a doomed figure, a modern myth, fated to repeatedly paint blank canvases that are foolishly praised by clueless critics. The absurdity of his success is born of his inability to connect. In contrast to the maxim “happiness writes white,” György’s misery paints blank but ironically slips into a Modernist groove that brings him fame yet shatters his relationship with his most dutiful son. Many characters in these stories are “swallowed” by their contempt for their new host countries. Their children struggle between the two worlds.
In the Last Notes story “Four Uncles,” a daughter, Krisztina, laments at his funeral that she never really had a father. “He was never really here,” she says of the old buzzard. “I think history ended for him the moment he left Hungary. I don’t know what kinds of truths they had then, but it seemed like he held on to them long after they’d become the worst kind of lies.” For the immigrant, seemingly safe and settled Canada can be a cheerless dead zone, acid for one’s dissolving identity.
Other emigres bring with them a European narcissism and Hungarian machismo, private specters that haunt them into their own graves. In Ghost Geographies, “Crosswords” is a story about the anger and in-fighting (the “cross” words) of emigre Hungarians for one another. “Canada is your home!” Hank, an emigre to Canada, shouts, soliciting door-to-door for a donation to one of the local Hungarian citizen groups in 1984. Feri, also an emigre, responds, “Canada is my prison! Canada is the place you forced me to live in. The place filled with my dead wife. The place I keep coming back to whenever I visit Hungary and realize I don’t belong there anymore, the country went on without me. When you people forced me out you forced me out forever!”
For Dobozy’s displaced characters, the past lingers within. Characters grapple in new settings often slipping into nostalgia and alienation, “a darkness so deep it was empty even of dreams.” In Ghost Geographies the story “Spires,” follows Paul, Maris, and their children escaping Hungary’s 1956 Revolution. The family finds themselves a world away, near Stillwater Bay on the west coast of Canada (where Dobozy himself grew up). The couple know that the relatives they left behind will be tormented by the Communist authorities, punished for their freedom. The Canadian wilderness is a blank for them, a company town with bad schools filled with “Indians and rednecks” to whom they feel superior. “I’m so tired of escaping,” Paul tells his wife. Then, like an artist, from a detritus of beer cans in a lumberman’s shack, Maris begins to recreate Hungary for her children out of garbage. She reconstructs the chain bridge over the Danube. With more cans and trash “she’d build the white towers, fine as fish bones, of the parliament buildings. Then Saint Stephen’s Basilica. The Academy of Sciences. The kids were helping now, fishing cans out of the cupboards, carrying them to her. Maris went on to describe the city as if they were walking through it.”
Dobozy’s style in his two recent collections resemble the unsettledness of Canadian short story writer and Paris emigre, Mavis Gallant. Like her, there are recurring characters and a stylistic lushness in the winding diamondback of vivid almost musical description as in “In Siege 13’s “The Animals of the Budapest Zoo.” It is a story about two friends hiding out in a derelict zoo during the Budapest bombings, there’s a magical scene where one of the characters begin reanimating the dead animals. In that vivid style reminiscent of Gallant, Dobozy writes: “Of the animals they’d released, a few vultures and eagles remained, circling above the zoo and drifting down lazily to feed on the plentiful carrion in the streets. When they returned to their nests, Sandor would wonder what was more poisonous in their bellies, the flesh of communists or fascists.”
At home in this style of imaginative realism, Dobozy has the evocative strangeness of Steven Milhauser or Curzio Malaparte’s war tales. The landscapes of each collection are littered with ruins, broken frames, torn fabric, old maps, collapsing villas, bogus symphonies, junked-up museums, homemade machines, or “things discarded and forgotten.”
Some conceptual stories in Ghost Geographies, like “Nom de Guerre,” were likely more fun to write than they are to read. They have the cold cleverness of an overloaded flash piece. But other experiments sparkle. “Lester’s Exit” resembles a documentary of interviews—a story without a first-person narrator—but develops slowly like a brightening image on a screen. In it, there are descriptions of images, films, drawings, fragments of confessions and official “documents.” But the reader is left to piece them together for meaning.
Dobozy also seems to adore the subject of the Hungarian swindler. Even before the notorious con artist Victor Lustig sold the Eiffel Tower twice or Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orban, shoveled EU funds to his right-wing nationalist patronage network, Hungary has long been associated with memorable frauds. One protean character in these stories, Oscar Teleki, reappears over the course of Dobozy’s two collections in three stories. He seems to move in and out of his individual life like a crab looking for a new shell. In Siege’s “The Encirclement,” shape-shifting Oscar Teleki is a writer and lecturer. After recreating himself as an interpreter of the Siege of Budapest, Oscar is accused by Sándor Eszterhazy, a seemingly blind scold in the audience (who later reappears in “Ghost Geographies”) of fakery and supporting the fascists. Who is telling the truth? What actually happened to these two survivors of the war? And who is the Oscar who appears in the final iteration, “The New and Improved Oscar Teleki”? Is the “Oscar” we meet simply a fraud who shared a room with the true Oscar? Or did he, like so many of the deracinated of our time, pick up the stories and persona we see around us and fit into a readymade identity, like putting on another person’s clothes? The reader, like the ever-digging narrators, become curious researchers, sifting through old articles, case histories and criminal profiles–invited in by the clues dropped from one story to the next–as we attempt to uncover a truth that may be impossible to uncover.
Throughout the collections, the refugees meet “impossible panoramas,” struggle with “unsettled boundaries,” and cross “unaccountable distances” to survive. Secret manuscripts often appear, or radio antennas—objects to hide and connect people deracinated or with short-circuited social bonds. Generations of characters are explored so Dobozy can deftly move from the ideological rigidity of Stalinism to the uncertainty of our own skeptical times. In each story, layers of ambiguity fog even the most obvious truths. Is one male beautician, layered in make-up, merely pretending to be gay, even decades later, in order to hide his past identity as a secret policeman? Or is his powdered mask sincere?
In Dobozy’s titular story, “Ghost Geographies,” one of the best of the collection, Sándor Eszterhazy dies of cold exposure in his seventies, after spending a lifetime refusing to accept the world’s borders. Sándor spent his life creating an art piece, a kind of map or atlas. He stitched vacant spaces together into this contiguous atlas and these “spectral” maps became real to him. His frozen corpse is discovered in one of the dodgy hostels he made his home along the Fort Erie and Buffalo border. He crossed boundaries and compiled non-places as a personal sham utopia, an obsessive myth-making exercise by compiling a map on “beer coasters, foolscap, the backs of postcards, even the waxy insides of cut and flattened coffee cups.” Lost in his mirage, this individual geography of slotted maps was consolation enough for the loss he had endured. What are the personas we construct on the internet and the bogus expertise we feel in those digital “rabbit holes” we find ourselves lost within but maps of our own making? Sándor is the ghost of our future.
Dobozy’s talent for renewing and then reimagining old forms are powerfully rendered, creating haunted characters attempting to gain footing in unsteady times. Like Sándor, Dobozy seems to be concerned with the disappearance of a perceived identity—the setting, culture, and community that forged us. His stories, like Sándor’s maps, are an artifact for a necessary construction towards connection in a scrambled era. The tragic assemblage of maps and stories is our human need, and the artistic vision for a better world. In an age threatened by grubby demagogues and climate change, Sándor’s work is all of Dobozy’s work itself—a carefully constructed hope, the marvel of the assembled dream.
March 8, 2017
During World War Two, Hungary was one of the Axis powers, with its own fascists led by the Arrow Cross Party. At first this seemed like a good idea, as Hungary gained back territories it had lost after the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. But late in the war, it became obvious that they were on the losing side. The Hungarian government tried to broker a separate armistice with the Soviet Union, only to have their country occupied by the Germans. As a result, they were forced to fight to the bitter end.
In late December of 1944 through February of 1945, the Soviet Army encircled the city of Budapest and besieged the troops and civilians within. It is that siege that gives us the title of this book, which contains thirteen short stories all of which tie into that event in some way, even if the characters are living in the Hungarian diaspora community in Toronto.
“The Atlas of B. Görbe” is about a struggling writer in New York City who turns to an older author of children’s books for assistance in finding his way.
“The Animals of the Budapest Zoo, 1944-1945” is set within the siege itself as the zookeepers come to realize they might not be able to keep themselves alive, let alone their charges, and the extreme steps one of the keepers takes.
“Sailor’s Mouth” takes place in Romania, where a man has come to adopt a child of Hungarian heritage. He may have become misled by his carnal urges. One of the themes in this story is “The Museum of Failed Escapes” that Judit, the woman the man is seeing, tells him about.
“The Restoration of the Villa Where Tíbor Kálmán Once Lived” concerns a deserter who joins the Communist occupation after the war. He takes over the home of a man who used to provide people with false papers to escape the Axis, and betrays their names to the Soviets one by one. But he gets the distinct feeling the villa is rejecting him…this one won an O. Henry award.
“The Beautician” is about a college student preparing his thesis paper. He finds a possible topic in the dark past of the manager of the club for Hungarian exiles in Toronto. But is that something he really wants to make known?
“Days of Orphans and Strangers” follows up on the Kálmán family mentioned in “Restoration.” One of them has been talking in his sleep, but not in the language you’d expect.
“Rosewood Queens” concerns the narrator’s relationship with her father’s lover, a collector of chess pieces (but never full sets.)
“The Encirclement” is about a lecturer on the topic of the Budapest siege, who finds himself with a persistent blind heckler who presents a different version of events. The details are too close to be fake, but that’s not the way the lecturer remembers it. I thought this story was the best in the book.
“The Society of Friends” features a long-standing love triangle among three Hungarian emigres. It reminded me a bit of the movie Grumpy Old Men. It shares a character with “Beautician.”
“The Miracles of Saint Marx” concerns a secret police officer’s search for a dissident who spreads tales of miraculous events. It becomes personal when one of those stories is about her. Also very good.
“The Selected Mug Shots of Famous Hungarian Assassins” is about a boy who handcrafts trading cards featuring what he says are Hungarian assassins. It seems to be all his imagination, until the narrator finds a book on the same topic years later… This story includes slurs against people with mental disabilities as a plot point, getting the boys in deep trouble.
“The Ghosts of Budapest and Toronto” is another tale of the Kálmán family. Ghosts are seen in two cities as separated members of the family miss each other.
“The Homemade Doomsday Machine” finishes the volume with a genius child who seeks the destruction of society and the Nazi atomic scientist who shares that interest. Has perhaps the happiest ending in the book. Has a character that seems too eager to diagnose the child as autistic, especially as she has no psychological or medical training.
Most of the stories are bittersweet, with a few downer endings. I found the writing competent but not compelling on average.
There are frequent mentions of rape, and suicide comes up a time or two. While the travails of the Jewish and Romani people in Hungary are mentioned, the emphasis is on ethnic Hungarians. There’s some period sexism and a number of the female characters express dislike of the patriarchal Hungarian family culture. Due to the heavy themes, I’d recommend this for college age and up.
Overall, I am glad I got the chance to read this. Books on the Hungarian experience are uncommon, and I discovered much I did not know. Recommended for other people wanting to broaden their experience.
In late December of 1944 through February of 1945, the Soviet Army encircled the city of Budapest and besieged the troops and civilians within. It is that siege that gives us the title of this book, which contains thirteen short stories all of which tie into that event in some way, even if the characters are living in the Hungarian diaspora community in Toronto.
“The Atlas of B. Görbe” is about a struggling writer in New York City who turns to an older author of children’s books for assistance in finding his way.
“The Animals of the Budapest Zoo, 1944-1945” is set within the siege itself as the zookeepers come to realize they might not be able to keep themselves alive, let alone their charges, and the extreme steps one of the keepers takes.
“Sailor’s Mouth” takes place in Romania, where a man has come to adopt a child of Hungarian heritage. He may have become misled by his carnal urges. One of the themes in this story is “The Museum of Failed Escapes” that Judit, the woman the man is seeing, tells him about.
“The Restoration of the Villa Where Tíbor Kálmán Once Lived” concerns a deserter who joins the Communist occupation after the war. He takes over the home of a man who used to provide people with false papers to escape the Axis, and betrays their names to the Soviets one by one. But he gets the distinct feeling the villa is rejecting him…this one won an O. Henry award.
“The Beautician” is about a college student preparing his thesis paper. He finds a possible topic in the dark past of the manager of the club for Hungarian exiles in Toronto. But is that something he really wants to make known?
“Days of Orphans and Strangers” follows up on the Kálmán family mentioned in “Restoration.” One of them has been talking in his sleep, but not in the language you’d expect.
“Rosewood Queens” concerns the narrator’s relationship with her father’s lover, a collector of chess pieces (but never full sets.)
“The Encirclement” is about a lecturer on the topic of the Budapest siege, who finds himself with a persistent blind heckler who presents a different version of events. The details are too close to be fake, but that’s not the way the lecturer remembers it. I thought this story was the best in the book.
“The Society of Friends” features a long-standing love triangle among three Hungarian emigres. It reminded me a bit of the movie Grumpy Old Men. It shares a character with “Beautician.”
“The Miracles of Saint Marx” concerns a secret police officer’s search for a dissident who spreads tales of miraculous events. It becomes personal when one of those stories is about her. Also very good.
“The Selected Mug Shots of Famous Hungarian Assassins” is about a boy who handcrafts trading cards featuring what he says are Hungarian assassins. It seems to be all his imagination, until the narrator finds a book on the same topic years later… This story includes slurs against people with mental disabilities as a plot point, getting the boys in deep trouble.
“The Ghosts of Budapest and Toronto” is another tale of the Kálmán family. Ghosts are seen in two cities as separated members of the family miss each other.
“The Homemade Doomsday Machine” finishes the volume with a genius child who seeks the destruction of society and the Nazi atomic scientist who shares that interest. Has perhaps the happiest ending in the book. Has a character that seems too eager to diagnose the child as autistic, especially as she has no psychological or medical training.
Most of the stories are bittersweet, with a few downer endings. I found the writing competent but not compelling on average.
There are frequent mentions of rape, and suicide comes up a time or two. While the travails of the Jewish and Romani people in Hungary are mentioned, the emphasis is on ethnic Hungarians. There’s some period sexism and a number of the female characters express dislike of the patriarchal Hungarian family culture. Due to the heavy themes, I’d recommend this for college age and up.
Overall, I am glad I got the chance to read this. Books on the Hungarian experience are uncommon, and I discovered much I did not know. Recommended for other people wanting to broaden their experience.
August 13, 2018
Unity: Atrocities are atrocious because they take on lives of their own, and affect whole generations — not just individuals. In this way, the Siege of Budapest and the following Soviet occupation affected the lives of every one of Dobozy’s character, and indeed, the lives of most Hungarians. The only meaning left to those who suffered was the meaning inherent in suffering itself.
3 Prompts:
1. How did the Siege of Budapest affect 2nd generation Hungarian immigrants? The siege brought on a persistent, yet ineffable kind of trauma on the later generations. It’s, as if, through horror alone, it took control of the first generation, and made them impress upon their youth the shadow of their own psychic anguish (see esp. the prostitute and her daughter in “The Museum of Failed Escapes”).
2. What is the value of art in light of Atrocity? Art as a product is meaningless, it is just as easily burned up, as Hollo burns up the narrator’s Thesis. Only art as the process of creating, relishing, and ultimately destroying has any meaning. The act of remembering is valuable, but not the memory.
3. What happens to a culture when the only ones left are the victims and the cowards? No brave men survived the siege whole. They either became cowards, betraying their comrades as soon as danger reared, or victims, being betrayed themselves, and forced into poverty and obedience. The brave — those who the cowards could not hurt — were killed.
Rating: 3.5/5
* Although at its best, Siege 13 is a marvelous and mellifluous cultural remembering of the effects of the 1945 Siege of Budapest, Dobozy’s Symbology sometimes gets the better of him. He hits the reader a bit too hard with images of the incomplete chess sets, Museums of Failed Escapes, and boy geniuses to sustain our disbelief. The stronger stories in this collection leave something to the imagination, and are better as a result.
3 Prompts:
1. How did the Siege of Budapest affect 2nd generation Hungarian immigrants? The siege brought on a persistent, yet ineffable kind of trauma on the later generations. It’s, as if, through horror alone, it took control of the first generation, and made them impress upon their youth the shadow of their own psychic anguish (see esp. the prostitute and her daughter in “The Museum of Failed Escapes”).
2. What is the value of art in light of Atrocity? Art as a product is meaningless, it is just as easily burned up, as Hollo burns up the narrator’s Thesis. Only art as the process of creating, relishing, and ultimately destroying has any meaning. The act of remembering is valuable, but not the memory.
3. What happens to a culture when the only ones left are the victims and the cowards? No brave men survived the siege whole. They either became cowards, betraying their comrades as soon as danger reared, or victims, being betrayed themselves, and forced into poverty and obedience. The brave — those who the cowards could not hurt — were killed.
Rating: 3.5/5
* Although at its best, Siege 13 is a marvelous and mellifluous cultural remembering of the effects of the 1945 Siege of Budapest, Dobozy’s Symbology sometimes gets the better of him. He hits the reader a bit too hard with images of the incomplete chess sets, Museums of Failed Escapes, and boy geniuses to sustain our disbelief. The stronger stories in this collection leave something to the imagination, and are better as a result.
August 9, 2017
13 well-written stories woven through with the themes and fallout of the siege of Budapest, detailing the victims, opportunists, and villains. It's a brutal read at times, hilarious at others, and often veers into thoughtful and sorrowful modes. I loved all the stories, started catching the connections towards the end, and thought I'd definitely like to read this again sometime just to follow the allusions better.
It's a fine collection of rich short fiction that swirls around an overlooked historical event. Well worth your time.
It's a fine collection of rich short fiction that swirls around an overlooked historical event. Well worth your time.
November 10, 2021
Siege 13 is beautifully written, thought-provoking, and imaginative while usually remaining entrenched in the terrifying realities of WWII and post WWII era Europe. Still, some stories in the collection had me laughing out loud—a testament to the author's depth of skill and limitless toolkit.
For the eloquent and imaginative, check The Atlas of B. Gorbe.
To experience the aforementioned harsh realities, check The Restoration of the Villa Where Tibor Kalman Once Lived.
For a thought-provoking and hilarious masterpiece, check The Society of Friends.
For the eloquent and imaginative, check The Atlas of B. Gorbe.
To experience the aforementioned harsh realities, check The Restoration of the Villa Where Tibor Kalman Once Lived.
For a thought-provoking and hilarious masterpiece, check The Society of Friends.
July 25, 2017
Treading on the border between fantasy and reality some of these stories are hard to believe. The scars, both visible and buried beneath the skin are life long, the march of the Red Army after World War II left behind it an important legacy that is fading into oblivion as the victims have mainly kept silent of their experiences. A very good novel, reads like a collection of short stories that are interrelated.
October 4, 2019
Beautiful writing that transports you into the story is the highlight of this collection of tales of the 1944 Budapest siege. Bogged down in the middle by a bit too much Rape, death, and the downtrodden, it picks up with an uplifting story by the end. These are stories about war, the fallout of war, and how war affects everything and everyone it touches, even through multiple generations. Points off for the weird cover art.
Number reading challenge: 13
Number reading challenge: 13
July 5, 2021
Collection of short stories surrounding the siege of Hungary in World War Two and its lingering impact on future generations. The writing is strong, and the stories are powerful. I liked "Animals in the Budapest Zoo, 1944-1945", and "The Beautician", but then stopped listing titles, as I would read all of them again. Not happy stories, for sure, but also not hopeless.
December 19, 2019
Pagaliau po tokio ilgo laiko perskaičiau įvairias keistas Vengrų istorijas apie gyvenimą po antrojo pasaulinio karo. Vienareikšmiškai keisčiausia skaityta knyga šiais metais, turbūt ir ilgiausią. Taip iki galo ir nesupratau tų visų keistų istorijų aprašytų šitoj knygoj.
December 10, 2022
Siege 13 is a collection of short stories relating to Hungarian characters both in and out of Hungary. Some are better than others, but all contain elements that provoke thought in the reader--they are not simply "surface reading".
May 25, 2017
Jedno od štiva kojem ću se vraćati s vremena na vreme.
June 8, 2017
no dice. cannot read this
June 28, 2023
I like it. Not easy to read
January 3, 2013
Books that deal with identity always make for powerful literature. Dobozy's collection of short stories show how a group of people went from the conflict of Budapest at the end of the Second World War,the occupation by the Red Army, up to immigranting to a new land, and - in some cases - the problems faced by their offspring. A well-written and well thoughtout read.
Page 66 - "The Restoration of the Villa"
It was the end of December 1944, and that night, running from the makeshift encampment and its marshalling yard, running and running long after the military police had given up, not wanting to risk their own lives by following him east, Zoltan realized it was hopeless, there was a wall of refugees coming at him, and behind it, the Russian guns, already so loud he felt as if they were sounding beside hi ears. Budapest was streaming with people fleeing from the suburbs - Rakosplota, Pestszentlorinc, Soroksar, Matyasfold - because the Red Army had not only arrived at these places already and taken control, but was advancing on Budapest itself.
So Zoltan became part of the human tide flowing from one death trap to another during the siege, and the things he'd seen would live on, unspoken, beneath everything he was to think and say from that point forward. Civilians used as human shields by the Red Army. Nazis exploding bridges over the Danube while there were still families and soldiers streaming across. Men and women forced to carry ammunition across the frozen river to German soldiers stationed on Margit Island while Soviet bullets and shells and bombs rained around them. He saw child soldiers holding off two dozen Russians by running up and down the stairs of a devastated building, shooting from every window, making them think there were a dozen soldiers trapped inside. Young boys crashing in gliders while attempting to fly in supplies for the fascist armies of Hitler and Szalasi, the fields littered with broken fuselages and wings and pilots contorted in positions that seemed to Zoltan the war's alphabet - untranslatable into human terms. There was a broken gas main near Vermezo that for days shot flame through every crack and hole in the asphalt - blue, orange, yellow - dancing along the road as if fire alone were capable of celebrating what had become of Budapest.
He'd seen exhausted doctors trying to save patients froma burning hospital, carrying them into the snow only to realize they had nothing - not a blanket, a sheet, even a shirt - to keep them from freezing. He'd come across the most beautiful girl, eighteen or nineteen, in one of the ruined homes filled those too wounded to go on, staring up at him, whispering from the mass of bodies, injured, starving, gripped by typhus, and as he leaned in to hear what she wanted to say - "Shoot me, please shoot me." - he noticed that both her legs had been torn away.
Page 66 - "The Restoration of the Villa"
It was the end of December 1944, and that night, running from the makeshift encampment and its marshalling yard, running and running long after the military police had given up, not wanting to risk their own lives by following him east, Zoltan realized it was hopeless, there was a wall of refugees coming at him, and behind it, the Russian guns, already so loud he felt as if they were sounding beside hi ears. Budapest was streaming with people fleeing from the suburbs - Rakosplota, Pestszentlorinc, Soroksar, Matyasfold - because the Red Army had not only arrived at these places already and taken control, but was advancing on Budapest itself.
So Zoltan became part of the human tide flowing from one death trap to another during the siege, and the things he'd seen would live on, unspoken, beneath everything he was to think and say from that point forward. Civilians used as human shields by the Red Army. Nazis exploding bridges over the Danube while there were still families and soldiers streaming across. Men and women forced to carry ammunition across the frozen river to German soldiers stationed on Margit Island while Soviet bullets and shells and bombs rained around them. He saw child soldiers holding off two dozen Russians by running up and down the stairs of a devastated building, shooting from every window, making them think there were a dozen soldiers trapped inside. Young boys crashing in gliders while attempting to fly in supplies for the fascist armies of Hitler and Szalasi, the fields littered with broken fuselages and wings and pilots contorted in positions that seemed to Zoltan the war's alphabet - untranslatable into human terms. There was a broken gas main near Vermezo that for days shot flame through every crack and hole in the asphalt - blue, orange, yellow - dancing along the road as if fire alone were capable of celebrating what had become of Budapest.
He'd seen exhausted doctors trying to save patients froma burning hospital, carrying them into the snow only to realize they had nothing - not a blanket, a sheet, even a shirt - to keep them from freezing. He'd come across the most beautiful girl, eighteen or nineteen, in one of the ruined homes filled those too wounded to go on, staring up at him, whispering from the mass of bodies, injured, starving, gripped by typhus, and as he leaned in to hear what she wanted to say - "Shoot me, please shoot me." - he noticed that both her legs had been torn away.
March 24, 2013
This book is really well written but just to difficult (for me) to engage with it. All the stories are intertwined and centred around the awful awful siege of the city of Budapest. It's evident from this book that every Hungarian alive at that time in History must have been affected in a devastating way. Themes of survival, (and the accompanying survival guilt,) betrayal, revenge, cowardice, identity, despair, and a very dark humour are woven throughout. I don't need a book to "feel good" necessarily but I do look for some transcendence, some hope, something to keep me from despairing. So let me describe it this way: I respect this work of fiction but I did not "like" it and I wouldn't recommend it.
April 28, 2013
This book is very well written with the stories intertwined thematically (others have already summarized that it is about, so I won't bother). Some characters appear in more than one story. I knew nothing about the siege of Budapest prior to reading this book and now I understand its sheer brutality. I did not like all the stories. I think some are a bit too abstract and, for example, Sailor's Mouth has a nice idea but the story itself is weak. I think The Beautician is an absolutely perfect story on both a mythic and plot level. I also loved Days of Orphans and Strangers.
The subject matter is sometimes very terrible and depressing, and some of the writing is a bit, uh, fancy for tis own good. But overall this is a complex and rewarding work of art. Read it!
The subject matter is sometimes very terrible and depressing, and some of the writing is a bit, uh, fancy for tis own good. But overall this is a complex and rewarding work of art. Read it!
July 16, 2017
I was unable to read all 13 stories due to time constraints, plus I don’t think I’m cut out for short stories, though I was able to get the flavour of the book. It is very well written but I wanted the characters to be more fully fleshed out as they might have been in a full-length novel, and I found myself skimming for plot points instead. At that point I realized it was time to put the book down.
However, the story that will stay with me forever was “The Animals of the Budapest Zoo.” War stories are always about the dynamics of people but I have never once thought or read about what happens to the animals. Truly original.
However, the story that will stay with me forever was “The Animals of the Budapest Zoo.” War stories are always about the dynamics of people but I have never once thought or read about what happens to the animals. Truly original.
August 7, 2013
Although I didn't make it all the way through this collection, these are good stories and I'll definitely read more by this author. Just not right now. While I love reading about other experiences and cultures, this book reveals the problem with collections by single authors. After reading about half of it, I just can't maintain my interest in the Hungarian expatriate experience no matter how lovely each individual story might be. It's due back at the library, so I'll take a break and check it out again a few months from now to finish.
April 11, 2013
This grouping of 13 short stories, thematically linked to one another, includes how WWII affected its generation and then their children, even in other countries. Dobozy traverses a wide range exceptionally well. There is the brilliant "The Restoration of the Villa Where Tibor Kalman Once Lived", and the surprisingly dark, dark humour of "The Selected Mug Shots of Famous Hungarian Assassins". As an ensemble, the stories portray the intergenerational nightmare consequences of war, any war, with brutal honesty.
September 12, 2013
I loved this haunting collection of short stories of the events of the Budapest Siege of 1944 and how it shaped the lives of this eclectic, damaged group of people. I was particularly moved by it as I read the collection during a stay in Budapest and while reading of their history in the absolutely chilling Terror Museum. This collection made me think hard about how I would react in those circumstances.
I particularly enjoyed The Beautician, The Animals of the Budapest Zoo and The Ghosts of Budapest and Toronto.
I particularly enjoyed The Beautician, The Animals of the Budapest Zoo and The Ghosts of Budapest and Toronto.
August 14, 2014
A well-crafted, ambitious collection, easily among my favourite story collections read in the past five years (which is certainly due to the strong eastern European influence in Dobozy's fiction). Lots of intelligence at work here and just enough sense of play to keep me satisfied. Dobozy crafts his stories, considers every line and plot point carefully, so there may lack a touch of spontaneity (for those of us who love that) but it's all so well done that I can forgive that. Much recommended.
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