This Side of Marriage and Beyond

Háy has arranged his most recent crop of short stories into four cycles. The somewhat curious title comes from feuilletons making up the first of these cycles. In these we read about ordinary people, men and women, who live ordinary lives that are nevertheless filled with Fortune's tiny dramas. Their secrets are petty and humdrum, and the entire lives of these strange characters are compressed into just a few pages. Whether they are still in a marriage or have put one behind them does not seem to matter: either way their prospects are far from rosy.
 The characters who feature in the second cycle are also simple people, but their fates unfold in more detail, with the author sketching them impassively, bitterly and sometimes satirically. Among the figures here are an alcoholic father, a sick old man and his first-born son who was brought up by step-parents; all share the experience of being rejected by their families. Háy views his protagonists sensitively and yet grotesquely, treating their misfortunes with sympathy, but not hiding their narrow-mindedness.
 The pieces making up the third cycle were originally written for an album of photographs of the bridges of Budapest by Gábor Fejér. They are compositions of the moment, but the bridge is always only a starting-point for the unfolding any given story.
 The fourth cycle consists, with all but two exceptions, of stories that were all published before in the collection Közötte apának és anyának, fölötte a nagy mindenségnek (Between Father and Mother, above the Big Universe, 2000).