17-19 Cockspur St, London SW1Y 5BL
Join writer Ádám Bodor and translator Peter Sherwood for a fascinating discussion about Ádám’s novel The Birds of Verhovina, now available in English thanks to Jantar Publishing.
A gripping and eloquent description of an unnamed totalitarian society in all its irrationality, absurdity, and implacability; provoking both laughter and shuddering in the reader.
The reader arrives in Ádám Bodor’s world, the periphery of civilisation, imagined at the Transcarpathian mountains, at the break of dawn. Adam, the foster son of Brigadier Anatol Korkodus is waiting at the dilapidated station for a boy who is arriving from a reform school. Soon afterwards, Korkodus is arrested, for unfathomable reasons. Yet this decaying and sinister world is not devoid of a certain joie de vivre: people eat gourmet dishes, point out their interlocutor’s hidden motives with incredibly dark humour and enjoy the region’s stunning natural beauty.
The Birds of Verhovina has been shortlisted for the EBRD Literature Prize 2022.
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Danse Macabre — Ádám Bodor's The Birds of Verhovina (HLO.hu)
The quality of this humour is akin to the barely perceptible smile of a Buddhist, but on the grubby face of Eastern Europe. And at any moment can transform to a grimace of horror—Viktória Radics's review of Hungarian writer Ádám Bodor's novel The Birds of Verhovina.
Available HERE.
