Magnet Hill

Réka Mán-Várhegyi’s novel Magnet Hill is innovative and exciting both in its subject matter and its poetics. It is hardly surprising that it won the 2019 European Union Prize for Literature.

The book is a tapestry of narrative games. A third-person narrator tells us the story of Enikő Börönd, who has just returned to Hungary from the United States to take her place in the world of sociology in Hungary. The story is not a linear narrative, but the fragments never leave the reader in doubt. The other voice belongs to Réka, a student of sociology, who recounts events in the first-- person. Réka is working on a novel, and one of the problems with which she is grappling is whether to use a first-person or third-person narrator. Thus, her character offers insights into the complexities of the process of writing.

The painfully funny descriptions offer an excruciatingly precise introduction to everyday life at Hungarian universities, including the chauvinism of this world, but we are also introduced to serious characters who indeed represent something more general.

Enikő is the child of a highly educated family in which the women’s strange family bonds make it almost impossible for them to live as girlfriends or wives. Yet for Réka, who is the first member of her family to move in these circles, this world is what she has longed for. Tamás Bogdán, Enikő’s ex and Réka’s current lover and also a first-generation scholar, brings a new shade of colour to this world through his research. Békásmegyer, a neighbourhood on northern fringes of Budapest full of housing projects and skinheads, appears in the novel as a land thronging with peripheral figures, and a sort of magic thread is gradually woven into the novel as Réka is compelled to ask whether she will be capable of escaping the mythical force of Magnet Hill in Békásmegyer and entering the world of the intellectual elite.

Réka Mán-Várhegyi is a Hungarian writer who was born in Romania in 1979. She grew up in Marosvásárhely (Târgu Mures), Romania. Her recent novel Magnet Hill won the prestigious European Union Prize For Literature in 2019. Mán-Várhegyi lives in Budapest, where she works as a book editor.