Literature stops at nothing and no one. In principle, everything can be made into literature. Every person, every place. That is why it was only a matter of time before someone would come up with the idea of placing a location at the center of a novel that has been known to us since youth as the center of petty bourgeois summer dreariness—the gravel pit. We already knew how terribly dull hot Sunday mornings on an air mattress could be; how terribly beautifully one can still write about the artificial gravel shore is proven by the Hungarian author Gergely Péterfy, born in 1966. Consequently, he simply omits all the dreary summer pleasures. And gets serious.

In his novel about the post-industrial body of water, which admittedly is also rather unimaginatively called “Gravel Pit,” Péterfy transforms the world into damp, surrealistic stories. Stories that deal with human flotsam that has accumulated on a Hungarian gravel beach. Strange beings, full of strange stories, strange legends. Eccentrics, drinkers and suicides, enigmatic women, peculiar love affairs. They land there, run aground there, disappear, suffocate underwater, for they never came to swim. The Hungarian rising star tells a grand parable about a wrecked society in his slim little book—rich in imagery, unsettling, profound. DW