Zoltán Böszörményi begins THE REFUGEE with his harrowing escape from the threat of imprisonment in an Eastern European dictatorship to devote the rest of the book to his equally adventurous detention in a refugee camp in Western Europe, taking the reader beyond the TV news images to give an inside look into the everyday life of a community of desperate people lacking in community spirit. The author unflinchingly describes what it is like living without legal status or civil rights in crowded, noisy and sometimes existentially dangerous dormitories, hanging on to the hope of finding acceptance in a peaceful country. The author’s problems at home arose from a volume of his poetry; it’s only natural that he should tell his story as a poet, in a novelistic, creative nonfiction style, the only way it can be given an authentic voice that can speak about feelings beyond facts.
The Club at Eddy's Bar by Zoltán Böszörményi - booktrust.org
Tamas is the link between the two divergent societies portrayed in this evocative story of human intrigue and ambition, desire and betrayal, commitment and infidelity. As he flees his homeland in Eastern Europe and arrives as a refugee in Canada, Tamas must battle with bureaucracy to set himself free from his past and ensure that his family can join him in his new life. He finds kindness and compassion too along the way as he struggles to learn a new language in an alien place and find the work that will be the key to his future success.
Dedicated to Lawrence Ferlinghetti on the occasion of his acceptance and subsequent rejection of the 2012 Janus Pannonius Poetry Prize awarded by the Hungarian PEN Club
Snap me up in your jaws and run off with me to join the shades of this world without souls. But if you try to devour me or plant a tree of fear inside me, I'll laugh at you.
Zoltán Böszörményi arrived in Toronto without the command of the language or any marketable skills and with $25 in his pocket. A few years and a college degree later he was running his own business. But it was not there that he made his first million.
“This book will be enjoyed by many and loathed by no less. No reader will be left indifferent.” Says György Ferdinándy, the writer.
“Not a bad book, but I doubt if I’d read it again,” said the person who handed me the book. This and the above quote on the back of the book piqued my curiosity.