These five stories, set mainly in the poverty-stricken, sometimes chaotic Budapest of before and just after World War Two, form a series of reflections on illness and its resonances in our feelings. This is an unusual theme for literature and one that gives the stories a fresh, revelatory force.


The title piece shows a doctor afflicted with a disease that makes his memory slip away from him literally word by word until he comes to believe that meaning really resides not in words but in the white spaces between words... The strange tale Vera illustrates a similar disturbance of outer and inner worlds. As in much of Pressburger’s writing, a lot of the main action takes place out of frame. In this sense Pressburger’s work is like that of S.Y.Agnon, another Jewish writer also originally from Mitteleuropa. Agnon was described as having ‘a deliberately restrained tone of narration’. This restraint, this delicacy in the face of individual tragedy and the general loss of war and social dislocation also marks Pressburger’s tone. Both writers’ work is set against the background of a world that no longer exists; their writing and their memories are, practically speaking, all that remains of it. Perhaps it is this great sadness, indirectly reflected in their stories, that makes the stories more than they appear to be at first glance.

‘He was a swift worker; no one else could set as many ens per hour as he could. Typographical errors were unknown to him. He could decipher the most garbled manuscripts. And no spelling mistake ever escaped him, no matter how deeply buried in the work of some poet or novelist. He would sit at his machine for thirteen, fourteen hours a day. With his pliers he would pull the tiny pieces of lead, each one embossed with a letter, from the packed wooden cases, and from there slide them into position in lines of type. The thoughts enclosed in each symbol by his own two hands danced before his eyes; and no messages born in dark rooms would find their way in the hands of other people into sumptuous buildings.’ p155

These five stories, set mainly in the poverty-stricken, sometimes chaotic Budapest of before and just after World War Two, form a series of reflections on illness and its resonances in our feelings. This is an unusual theme for literature and one that gives the stories a fresh, revelatory force.

The title piece shows a doctor afflicted with a disease that makes his memory slip away from him literally word by word until he comes to believe that meaning really resides not in words but in the white spaces between words... The strange tale Vera illustrates a similar disturbance of outer and inner worlds. As in much of Pressburger’s writing, a lot of the main action takes place out of frame. In this sense Pressburger’s work is like that of S.Y.Agnon, another Jewish writer also originally from Mitteleuropa. Agnon was described as having ’a deliberately restrained tone of narration’. This restraint, this delicacy in the face of individual tragedy and the general loss of war and social dislocation also marks Pressburger’s tone. Both writers’ work is set against the background of a world that no longer exists; their writing and their memories are, practically speaking, all that remains of it. Perhaps it is this great sadness, indirectly reflected in their stories, that makes the stories more than they appear to be at first glance.

’He was a swift worker; no one else could set as many ens per hour as he could. Typographical errors were unknown to him. He could decipher the most garbled manuscripts. And no spelling mistake ever escaped him, no matter how deeply buried in the work of some poet or novelist. He would sit at his machine for thirteen, fourteen hours a day. With his pliers he would pull the tiny pieces of lead, each one embossed with a letter, from the packed wooden cases, and from there slide them into position in lines of type. The thoughts enclosed in each symbol by his own two hands danced before his eyes; and no messages born in dark rooms would find their way in the hands of other people into sumptuous buildings.’ p155