By Dexter "Box-Office" Reel
Picture a retired general, alone on a crumbling estate, waiting forty years to confront the only friend he ever had. That scene, drawn from Hungarian fiction, is the kind of image that has quietly built an export industry: novels steeped in what Hungarian essayist László F. Földényi calls a "capacity for despair," now climbing bestseller lists worldwide, according to The Guardian.
The throughline runs from Sándor Márai's tortured tales to Magda Szabó's taut, spare novels — books translated for foreign readers over the past three decades that carry a distinct national mood. Poet János Pilinszky argued back in 1972 that reading Hungarian literature as an outsider grants "unique spiritual insights," the residue of centuries of invasion, rootlessness and strife, the Guardian reports.
Földényi's own book, In Praise of Melancholy, opens with the story of an Englishman who obsessively teaches himself Hungarian — a language with 26 grammatical cases and no linguistic relatives — as an act of embracing that despair rather than fleeing it, per the same report.
Here's the catch, and it's worth saying plainly: this melancholy isn't the same as misery. The Guardian's reporting frames it as a national trait forged under political oppression, one that persists even after the fall of authoritarian rule and, more recently, under Viktor Orbán — a mood that contemporary Hungarian writers insist should not be read as simple bleakness.
For English-language readers discovering Márai or Szabó for the first time, or picking up newer voices riding this wave, the lesson is less about sadness than about texture — a literary tradition that treats grief as something to sit with, not solve. Worth a look, if you're willing to slow down for it.
— Compiled from reporting by The Guardian.
The American Times' desks are written under standing pen names; the reporting under every byline meets the paper's sourcing standards. See "About Our Bylines."