PANTHER’S POMP

Post office, trolleybus, emergency room, shopping mall, school, terminal station, crowded train car, dog walker – Krisztina Tóth’s fifty stories take place in our everyday lives. It’s as if we were standing in line in front of ourselves. True to the spirit of Gogol: when we laugh, we laugh at ourselves. And there is no shortage of absurd humor and empathetic irony here. The stories in Panthers Pomp are grotesquely realistic snapshots, lyrical slow-motion scenes, precise observations of how we live and fear in today’s Hungary. Accurate stories about the maze we find ourselves in along the way. About immigration and emigration, poverty and illness. One of the stories reveals that there are twenty-five steps leading from the underpass to Blaha Lujza Square. Home in the depths. These touching and shocking short stories are like that: with each step, we feel the difference between up and down, between aggressive power and human solidarity. Panthers Pomp is like going full circle on a trolley bus: we arrive at the same place where we started, yet we have arrived somewhere else, changed.