The Sinistra Zone

by Adam Bodor, Paul Olchváry (Translator)

Overview

Lyrical, surreal, and yet unsettlingly realistic, The Sinistra Zone swims in the totalitarian backwaters of Eastern Europe

Entering a weird, remote hamlet, Andrei calls himself “a simple wayfarer,” but he is in fact highly compromised: he has no identity papers. Taken under the wing of the military zone’s commander, Andrei is first assigned to guard the blueberries that supply a nearby bear reserve. He is surrounded by human wrecks, supernatural umbrellas, birds carrying plagues, albino twins.

The bears — and an affair with a married woman — occupy Andrei until his protector is replaced by a new female commander, “a slender creature, quiet,diaphanous, like a dragonfly,” and yet an iron-fisted harridan. As things grow ever more alarming, Andrei becomes a “corpse watchman,” standing guard over the dead to check for any signs of life, and then … 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780811219792
Publisher:	New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	08/17/2013
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	208
File size:	305 KB

About the Author

The author of ten volumes of fiction since 1969, Ádám Bodor is an award-winning, Transylvanian-born Hungarian writer.
Paul Olcháry has received grants from the NEA, PEN, and Hungary’s Milán Fu¨st Foundation.

Editorial Reviews

When Andrei, a wayfarer and "simple harvester of fruit," arrives in the Ukrainian border town of Dobrin in search of his runaway adopted son he becomes entangled in the bizarre social and political world of the isolated village. Dobrin borders the Sinistra military zone (a pun on "sinister" and the real breakaway territory of Transnistria) where Andrei's son supposedly lives, and Bodor captures the cold realities of this totalitarian state in which each resident fulfills an assigned duty and is subject to the zone commander's whims. The security of Andrei's tenure in the village is threatened when his benefactor, the kind Colonel Borcan, who allowed Andrei to stay without identity papers, dies and is replaced by the ruthless Izolda Mavrodin. She quickly forms a citizen police, "the grey ganders", to monitor locals' behavior and threatens to banish Andrei for whom she sees no purpose in the zone. While Bodor's writing is rich with descriptions of unique characters—from a pair of albino twins to a jovial Turkish trucker unafraid of Mavrodin's threats—the narrative lacks urgency and the myriad peculiar characters distract from Andrei's mission to find his son. (June)

Publishers Weekly

"The Sinistra Zone is a small masterpiece of stunning beauty that begs to be savored slowly."

La Vanguardia

"It is hard to find in contemporary European literature a satire more dark and brutal and yet at the same time, more lyrical than this book."

El País

"A fascinating novel that links intense realism with a boundless imagination, as if it could have written by Gabriel García Márquez."

Die Zeit

"If there’s a magic realism Eastern-bloc style, The Sinistra Zone is surely its paradigm."

The New York Times Book Review - Alison McCulloch

"The Sinistra Zone begins à la Chandler. But that's not how it continues. Like all good things, it embodies a wealth of possibilities: it can be read as a sociological intelligence briefing; a political/cultural situation report; a supplication; a finely wrought, postmodern feat of literary virtuosity; a chronicle of a bygone world, and so on. Again and again I was amazed by the fullness of the words, by the compact and luminous text — by the rich and powerful fabric that Ádám Bodor has woven into these pages."

Péter Esterházy