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    Siege 13: Stories
    Siege 13: Stories
    Siege 13: Stories
    Ebook340 pages5 hours

    Siege 13: Stories

    By Tamas Dobozy

    3.5/5

    ()

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    About this ebook

    Stories exploring a world of ordinary people caught between the pincers of aggressors, leading to actions at once deplorable, perplexing, and heroic.

    In the fall of 1944, the Red Army encircled Budapest, surrounding tens of thousands of German and Hungarian troops, and nearly a million civilians. The ensuing months witnessed one of the most brutal sieges of World War II, with block-to-block guerilla warfare followed by widespread disease, starvation, and unspeakable atrocities. Richly grounded in this historical trauma and its extended aftermath, the stories in Siege 13 alternate between the siege itself and a contemporary community of Hungarian émigrés who find refuge in the West.

    Illuminating the horror and absurdity of war with wit and subtlety, Tamas Dobozy explores a world in which right and wrong are not easily distinguished, and a gruesome past manifests itself in perplexing, often comical ways.

    Winner of the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize

    Praise for Siege 13

    “Alice Munro . . . Isaac Babel . . . Those comparisons may sound daunting, but Dobozy has mastered the technical conventions of his craft . . . This vivid rendering of Hungarian history as a nightmare from which no one quite wants to awake is Dobozy’s finest achievement.” —Garth Risk Hallberg, The New York Times Book Review

    “The sheer variety of Dobozy’s approaches to telling stories, and his commitment not only to provoke thought but to entertain, constitute a virtuoso performance. Siege 13 is without question one of my favorite story collections ever.” —Jeff VanderMeer, The Washington Post

    “A superb collection of short stories that revisits two of the deadliest months in Hungarian history. The book tells the stories of those who hid, those who fought, those who betrayed, those who escaped and those who died, and how the effects of the siege still linger, three-quarters of a century later. . . . Siege 13 is one of the best books of the year.” —Mark Medley, National Post (Canada)
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateJan 21, 2013
    ISBN9781571318879
    Siege 13: Stories
    Author

    Tamas Dobozy

    Tamas Dobozy was born in Nanaimo, BC. After receiving his Ph.D. in English from the University of British Columbia, he taught at Memorial University. When X Equals Marylou, his first collection of short fiction, was shortlisted for the Danuta Gleed Award. Tamas Dobozy now teaches in the Department of English and Film Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario.

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    Reviews for Siege 13

    3.5/5

    20 ratings2 reviews

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    • 4/5
      This has a lot of emotional weight – all the stories were very textbook short story, in that they created a tiny, encapsulated emotional world and many of them ended in an epiphany. But – and there's always a but with me – I felt that first, there was too much similarity of theme and second, and more important, that there was a certain lack of compassion for his characters.

      He creates sad people – people who know they're sad; people who don't and find out over the course of the story; people who write elaborate fictions to conceal the fact that they're sad from themselves and others. So what's the problem? You can write sad characters in sympathy, because you're a sad person, and you want to show that there's a little sadness and self-delusion in all of us, or you can write them as a voyeur, to peek into sad little lives as though through the windows of a dollhouse, or to show the reader that they aren't like the characters, to make the reader feel better, because they're not delusional in the way that a boy creating doomsday machines because he can't handle his parents' divorce is.

      And it's true that a lot of them are about showing that a lot of self-conception is self-delusion, which is necessary – "It was nice for you, for a while, thinking differently about yourself?" Father Szent-Mihály asks in "The Miracles of Saint Marx," even though it was because of a lie he told. But there's always that sense that Dobozy doesn't feel it himself.

      As to similarity of theme, Dobozy does very well writing stories that are about being an immigrant in a way that aren't explicitly about being an immigrant, even when the main characters are immigrants. What I mean is that feeling like you're the loose tooth in an otherwise perfect row (too smart; too dumb; just not the same; missing something; feeling displaced in what should be home) isn't a uniquely immigrant experience, though being an immigrant can exacerbate it, and Dobozy made me feel that intensely.

      But all of them are about that or about the stories people tell about themselves or both, so the collection as a whole feels tonally monotone. Do we need all of these stories? At almost 350 pages, it's a fairly long collection and doesn't need padding. I'm not sorry I read all of them, but it does feel like a surfeit, especially since incidents seem to repeat across stories.

      If you can ignore worries about his compassion, and if you spread your reading out a lot, though, it's very good. His prose is beautiful, and his insights into people's minds and relationships are cutting and real. I just wish there had been a little more selectivity, so that the discontent wouldn't have had time to brew and ferment.
    • 2/5
      This book is really well written but just to difficult (for me) to engage with it. All the stories are intertwined and centred around the awful awful siege of the city of Budapest. It's evident from this book that every Hungarian alive at that time in History must have been affected in a devastating way. Themes of survival, (and the accompanying survival guilt,) betrayal, revenge, cowardice, identity, despair, and a very dark humour are woven throughout. I don't need a book to "feel good" necessarily but I do look for some transcendence, some hope, something to keep me from despairing. So let me describe it this way: I respect this work of fiction but I did not "like" it and I wouldn't recommend it.

    Book preview

    Siege 13 - Tamas Dobozy

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