Between Jakarta and Budapest – Attila Bartis evening at Müpa
On October 3rd in the Glass Room of the Müpa, the audience will be treated to an Attila Bartis evening, during which the writer’s duplicity, the distances between his home in Jakarta and Hungary, cannot be avoided, just as his lonely or even solitary role in contemporary literature cannot be avoided, as the regime change meant. his polarizing opinion on the loss of hopes and illusions can also make those present think.
“Moving to the countryside does not mean crossing my borders, but that I try to make my life free of complaints within them. I do not dispute that this is also a constitutional issue. Look, cutting or shoveling shit out of a bud isn’t fun for me, but it’s not a problem either. At the moment, however, simple shopping at the greengrocer in Pest is already a problem. If given the choice, I don’t have much to think about. I’m not afraid of familiarity, which many fear. I almost said I wasn’t interested, but that’s not true, because if I wasn’t interested, I wouldn’t want to keep the apartment on Vas Street. And of course that’s why I want to keep it. I have lived in Budapest for twenty-three years, my children were born here and live here. It almost blew my mind that I love this city. My home. I don’t want to leave it behind as something I no longer have anything to do with, I just don’t want to spend most of my everyday life here,” Attila Bartis answered a question from István Kemény in 2007. Litera in his unusual interview.
The excerpt shows Bartis’ figure and character in a performance. But we would go the same way even if we chose excerpts from his prose and photographs from elsewhere. Attila Bartis fled to Hungary with his father at the end of the 1980s, he did not let go of his Transylvanian roots, but he never spoke of his source region in a tone of softening nostalgia. On the contrary, he began his writing career in Budapest, working side by side with contemporaries and friends such as István Kemény, Árpád Kun, and János Térey. It is no exaggeration to say that a generation set out at this time, authors who were part of the stream of postmodern poetics, but who had already made their mark.
Attila Bartis The seta he first greeted us with his short novel – in sports language – and then he built exciting high points on the borders of photography and prose, and then his output with short stories (The bluish mist) to be completed The tranquility and The end for works of summary importance. And for the last work so far, In search of lost time.
We can be sure that Attila Bartis’s quiet and thoughtful sentences and his narrative pace, worthy of his novels, open a path to the lost times.