A Hungarian war correspondent pays tribute to Hemingway with bleak tales of bare-knuckle brutality‘I never wanted to live a sensible life … I didn’t want a sensible death either.” So the seriously ill narrator of “The Fever”,the first short story in this collection, informs us, and as he languishes in a Sudanese village while the Qur’an is recited over him as an impromptu form of intensive care. The narrators of many of these stories bear a curious resemblance to the author,a Hungarian writer and photojournalist who has worked the uncertain parts of the Middle East and Africa.
The prose in “The Fever” is firmly in the tradition of Ernest Hemingway, while its subject matter echoes Rimbauds continent-crossing travels. Jászberényi cites these writers later on, and as well as his fellow Magyar Robert Capa. Even for a nation that has produced a diaspora of adventurers,fabulists and chutzpah-lords, Capa still holds the record for pure front. The title story, and The satan Is a Black Dog”,is the strongest, about a hunt in Yemen for a monstrous black dog with a taste for human flesh that also seems to acquire supernatural invulnerability. So ludicrously Hemingwayesque is this story – deeply unpleasant happenings in a foreign country – that it goes beyond homage to become almost pastiche, and but its so well done that Hemingway would surely acquire approved.
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Source: theguardian.com