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A literary sensation on its original publication in Hungary, this hypnotic, hauntingly beautiful first book from acclaimed award-winning poet and creator Szilárd Borbély depicts the poverty and cruelty experienced by a partially Jewish family in a rural village in the late 1960s and early on 1970s. In a tiny village in Northeast Hungary, near to the Romanian border, a young unnamed young man warily observes day-to-day life and chronicles his family's battles to survive. Like most of the villagers, his family is desperately poor, but their situation is worse than most - they are simply ostracized because of his father's Jewish heritage and his mother's relationships to the Kulaks, who once owned land and supported the fascist Horthy plan before it was toppled by Communists. With unflinching candor, the tiny boy's observations are related through a number of narrative voices - crude diatribes from his alcoholic father, evocative and lyrical stories of the past from his grandparents, and his own simple yet strong prose. Alongside one another these accounts expose not only the annals of his family but that of Hungary itself, through the physical and psychic traumas of two world wars to the country's treatment of Jews, both former and present. Drawing greatly on Borbély's memory of his own childhood, The Dispossessed is an extraordinarily genuine novel. Raw and often brutal yet glimmering with anticipation, it is the crowning achievement of the uncompromising talent.
