Grendel wanted to be a mathematician, but when he lost his beloved father at the age of 16, he realised that the world was not as rational and calculable as he had thought. In his first book of short stories, he deals mostly with the world of his youth, and, as stated in an interview, “Every incident is multi-faced, every deed ambivalent, every value double-faced . . . there is nothing you can point at that is moral or immoral from the beginning of time, nothing is purely good or bad. Everything is determined by the situation. The concrete, never-to-be-repeated situation. Man is always in a given situation, stepping from one situation to another. One single question has always possessed me: the opportunities of free, autonomous action. Here, now, as a Hungarian of Slovakia.”

In order to understand the present and weigh the possibilities of the future, Lajos Grendel’s first novel turns to the past, to the generation of his forefathers, analyzing historical situations. Grendel notes, “You can take responsibility for the past or you can refuse it loudly and cast it off. There’s only one thing you can’t do: avoid it. The reason for this is that the past is coded into our reflexes, into our subconscious. What does the past mean to me? A burden. The fact that I am not only a Hungarian, but one living in minority, means to me that I have to shoulder—we, all six hundred thousand of us, have to shoulder—the past, looking at it with a critical eye, but accepting its continuity both in a legal and in a spiritual sense.”

His collected essays and articles show Lajos Grendel to be an important thinker and spiritual leader in the political life of the Hungarian community in Slovakia. This volume searches for solutions and methods for Slovaks and Hungarians, fatherlands and minorities, to co-exist, in place of delirious emotions and ultra-nationalistic illusion. In a major essay from 1990, Grendel wrote, “One and half, two years ago the western press called Czechoslovakia Absurdistan. I am certain that this term could be used for the entire region east of the Oder and Leitha. Our lives are spent in confusion of values and consciousness, in confusion of our national identity, unprecedented economic chaos and bankruptcy—definitely not monotonously. The writers of Central and Eastern Europe have a chance now to find Absurdistan—as Musil found Kakan—and its truest literary styles, language and genre.”