Summer Resort

Summer Resort, the first novel by noted translator Esther Kinsky, is set in a village somewhere on the endless Hungarian plain. It is the hottest summer in memory and everyone in the village dreams of the sweet life in Üdülö, a summer resort on a river. The characters that populate Summer Resort tell stories—comic, tragic, or both—of life in rural Hungary. Tales of onion kings and melon pickers, of scrapyards and sugar beet factories, paint a vivid and human picture of their world.

In the course of the novel, the storytellers’ paths intersect at the summer resort with the bar owner Lacibacsi, the Kozak Boys and their fat and pale wives, and the builder Antal, who introduces a mysterious new woman to the inhabitants of the resort. The stranger disrupts their otherwise staid summer routines—with surprising, unpredictable consequences.

Summer Resort is selected as one of DW's 100 German Must-Reads!

‘An exuberant display of highly-charged linguistic energy, and a clear indication of [. . .] animated imagination, attentiveness to nature and [an] astute eye for detail [. . .] a startlingly sensual work.’ —Joseph Schreiber, roughghosts

‘The text is characterized by dense, saturated images, unusual adjectives, laconism, a beautifully woven net of motifs and balladic construction. Kinsky’s word creations and her distant irony, which give the book a sense of timelessness gradually turning into a tragic tone, are characteristic of Hungarian prose tradition, especially of short stories [. . .] Summer Resort is lyric prose; it speaks the language of metaphors.’ —Noémi Kiss, Hungarian Literature Online