BOOK LAUNCH // WE WALK IN TWOS!
Perhaps a musician who can no longer play music, a married couple arguing at a wedding, a man about to start a hot air balloon business, a kleptomaniac cleaning lady spinning fantasies about entities that attack consciousness. These are figures from Zoltán Egressy's loosely interconnected short prose, which open up to the ordinary and the extraordinary at the same time. If at first sight the stories seem real, a little exaggeration or intensification will lift them out of the everyday; if the author takes us out of the everyday, he makes sure that he does not merely show us the sometimes false, detached perspective of the characters and its subtle parody, but that there is a kind of deep-rooted core of reality in everything. Whoever and whatever they are, Zoltán Egressy, in his short stories, which seem extremely natural and free of all mannerisms, gets close to his characters and, like a psychologist, probes their way of thinking, their self-deceptions, their differences of opinion, their special speech, their mangled language, their sloppy phrasing, with unfailing interest. This is how Two by Two on the Stairs becomes a memorable combination of lyrical atmosphere and empathy-infused humour.
Schedule
Zoltán Egressy is a contemporary Hungarian writer, winner of the Ernő Szép and Attila József awards. Born in 1967 in Budapest. He graduated from the Eötvös József High School, then from the Hungarian History Department of the ELTE Teacher Training College in 1990. Between 1990 and 1998 he worked as a journalist. In 1991 he published his first book of poetry, Csókkor, and subsequently translated (Paulo Leminski, Salvatore Quasimodo) and has been writing plays since 1995. His most important plays include Reviczky; Portuguese; Sausage and chips; Blue-blue-blue; 4 x 100; June. His name was made famous by his play Portuguese, which was premiered in 1998 at the Katona József Theatre under the direction of Andor Lukáts. The Portuguese has since toured the stages of Hungary and Europe.
Admission is free (but all support is gratefully accepted).
Nyitott Műhely
The Open Workshop is a fine place, a place where many different kinds of people can feel at home, which is to say that there is something that is rare and difficult to create, the spirit of the place. This spirit is very sympathetic to me, because it means both that there are shows that interest me and that the occasional stew is okay. And that I'm likely to meet people there who I'm happy to meet, and it's not even out of the question that they're me. Such public (open) spaces are rare in Budapest.
