Tranquility
by: Attila Bartis and Imre Goldstein (Transl.)

Softcover. NY, Archipelago Books, 1st, 2008, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover in pictorial wrappers, 292 pages. Tranquility, the acclaimed third novel by Hungarian Attila Bartis, is simultaneously a private psychodrama and a portrait of the end of the Communist era. Reading it, "we arrive at ourselves, at our own obsessions, in our own silence," writes Ilma Rakusa. A thirty-six-year-old writer struggles to escape his hellish, Oedipal inter dependency with his actress mother as Hungary's Communist infrastructure collapses around him. One of the most psychologically dark and ironic novels to have emerged from contemporary Hungarian literature, it is also, as far as human psychology and political farce are concerned, one of the most illuminating. Clean, bright copy.