The Hungarian Sentence is a novel written in one sentence, long and meandering like the Danube. It is the story about a strange and passionate friendship between Joe, a genius writer, a refugee from Bosnia to the Montenegrin coastal city of Ulcinj, and his rich, successful, but much less talented Montenegrin friend, also a writer. The Montenegrin writer and narrator, is traveling from Budapest to Vienna by train, after attending the funeral of his friend who seemingly committed suicide in Budapest. As he travels, he reflects on Joe’s death, an act of moral rebellion against the demise of humanity  – in many ways connected with that of his obsessive interest, the German philosopher Walter Benjamin who committed suicide when his attempt to escape Nazi Europe failed. The train enters the Austrian capital with the narrator ready to sell what the contents of his briefcase: the fabled Walter Benjamin’s lost manuscript, only this is the one written by his dead friend. Nikolaidis brings up Syrian refugees at the Hungarian border, political correctness as a tool of denying fear and mistrust of one another, and faceless EU bureaucracy as a tool for the disempowering of citizens. With conspiracy theories, apocalyptical innuendos and mittel-european references,  The Hungarian Sentence is thus a comment on the predicament of man in the liberal world, and the bewildering crisis of choice that results in a spiritual paralysis.

 

90 pages – Original language: Bosnian (Buybook/Bosnia and Herzegovina, OKF/Montenegro, 2017) – Foreign Editions: Croatian (Jesenski i Turk, 2017), German (Voland & Quist, 2017), Serbian (KPZ Beton, 2017), Slovenian (Lud , Šerpa, 2018), Hungarian (Gondolat, 2019)

ENGLISH LANGUAGE SAMPLE AVAILABLE