MORE ONE MINUTE STORIES

A one minute story by Örkény is an enigmatic something. It is not just short prose, it is a combination of many things, anecdote... short note, found object, tale, joke, parable, a little of everything. Örkény does not tell it, he comes out and says it. What he writes is philosophy, but it is not abstract. sit is witty, but not convivial. Keen, lnsparing, brutal - poetic. Wry, elegant, consistent - in short, Hungarian. From time to time, the one minute stories resemble post-Auschwitz terns that cant be written. A sad, much suffering man, this is how I have always thought, of him at he is my contemporary. That is an Eastern-European, so ab avo, he knows a great deal. A great deal, and - ab ovo - not enough. I thought I could see all this on his heavy, furrowed, laughing face. He died in 1979, over twenty-five years ago. This is when we are most apt to forget a writer. Örkeny is the great exception. (from the preface to more one minute stories by Péter Esterházy)