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Adam Bodor, a fifty-seven-year-old Transylvanian writer now living in Hungary, has achieved immense, well-deserved fame with Sinistra korzet (within less than a year the book has been translated into seven languages), a thin volume of unimaginably gruesome tales. "Sinistra District," subtitled "Chapters of a Novel," is a cycle of fifteen stories--each complete in itself--forming a real novel.
We are in the realm of an antiutopia, a cursed, amoral, totalitarian existence poignantly familiar. The ambiguous setting, a metaphorical province that plays a predominant role, is somewhere in the Carpathian Mountains of Romania, near the Ukrainian border. It is a dark, destructive, devastating region, a "freezing hell" whose inhabitants live in captivity, some in enforced bondage, some in self-imposed exile. This baleful, restricted territory, controlled by an impersonal, sadistic secret police and/or military force, is not merely a fictional communist camp or penal colony but, as the title suggests, an absurd, "postmodern" gulag, an irrational survival zone of demonic proportions. The time is either the recent past or the near future--possibly a period following a nuclear holocaust.
The novel's antihero (and...