A twentieth-century Hungarian writer rewriting Gulliver’s adventures — despite its oddity, the idea has produced an entertaining and profound book which is still to find its place in the canon of utopian writing. Its hero, Gulliver, undergoes the predictable experiences: while serving as surgeon on a British ship he suffers a shipwreck and finds himself stranded in a strange country; the land of the Hins which has reached the utmost perfection of technical civilisation which he first adores then finds suffocating. At his own request, he is allowed to pay a visit to what we would call the ‘primitives reservation’, the Behins, which represent the polar opposite of Hindom, then finding both unsatisfactory, Gulliver risks escaping home.

Due to the tradition of Gulliver’s Travels, the story, published two years before Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World appeared, offers the chance to examine the roots and the nature of human society. The society of the Hins, where he first arrives, is represented not only as the apex of human civilisation, but also as the acme of rational social organisation. Life there is organised according to the simple principles of kazo (rightful) and kazi (irrational) and there human reason is regarded as the ultimate organising form of social existence. The world of the Hins is perfectly ordered, and they live in perfect contentment with their organisation and with themselves, while, as it is exposed through the eyes of the English beholder (as imagined by a Hungarian author). The Hin society is also devoid of fellow-feeling, variety, arts, politics, love and affection, in other words, the rest of the characteristics normally understood to be the core of humanity in addition to reason. Gulliver feels isolated (in a society fundamentally based on isolation) in this world of bleak perfection. The society of the Behins, regarded as atavistic survivors of a previous stage of humanity, represents the polar opposite of unbridled reason; their unreason, their commitment to incomprehensible rules, convoluted and self-contradictory social rituals, and ever-changing allegiances and constant warfare, violence, and brutality, first appear reassuringly familiar to the hero, until he realises that this deeply irritating social organisation survives as long as the Hins provide the material support for it. Finally, Gulliver finds both the personal vacuum of the first society as well as the lunacy of the second one incomprehensible, and returns to his homeland, only to discover (like Johnathan Swift’s hero) that his adventures expose the abnormality of what he had considered normal and ordinary before.

The following quotation illustrates his attempt to explain English society to Zolema, his Hin girlfriend, and the way she interprets it:

‘Tell me,’ I said in a trembling voice, ‘don’t you feel at times that you need someone who appreciates you, someone to whom you can relate what pleases and displeases you; someone who is for you more pleasant than the others? I need somebody very much, to hold; someone to whom I can nestle close and with whom I can exchange tender words, and whose voice would quench my thirst. Look at the moon as it dances on the waves divided into a thousand pieces, look at the millions of stars, the evening, the sea, this endless night which drives people to each other and opens hearts to each other...’

‘I don’t understand,’ she interrupted. ‘Stop it! Time is passing without purpose whereas I have a wish.’

A new quiver filled my limbs, more and more I was feeling that this disappointment would be fatal and the inner tension would burst its limits.

‘I am at your disposal,’ I said trembling.

‘My desire has awakened and apart from this I have still to give birth to two children. Are you available for sexual work?’ 137-8