Captivity

Born in 1946 in Budapest, award-winning dramatist, novelist, and translator György Spiró has earned a reputation as one of postwar Hungary’s most prominent and prolific literary figures. He teaches at ELTE University of Budapest, where he specializes in Slavic literatures.Tim Wilkinson gave up his job in the pharmaceutical industry to translate Hungarian literature and history. He is the primary translator of Nobel Prize-winner Imre Kertész. Wilkinson’s translation of Kertész’s Fatelessness won the PEN Club/Book of the Month Translation Prize in 2005.

“Monumental…. The level of detail is stunning; Mr. Spiró seems to know absolutely everything about the first-century Mediterranean world and revels in Herodotean digressions…. Mr. Spiró’s encyclopedic tendencies do not hobble “Captivity,” which never loses steam. In Tim Wilkinson’s forceful translation, we are transported to a world of political corruption and messianic hopes. Uri, whose maturation gives the story its psychological heft, exemplifies the enigmas and tensions of Diaspora Jewry across history. Readers will find particularly strong resonance in the scenes of the Alexandria riots of A.D. 38, pointedly depicted as the first pogrom in history. “Horrors are on the way,” Uri predicts. “Alexandria is a model: it will become fashionable wherever a significant Jewish minority is living, be it in Africa or Asia, anywhere, it is going to be expedited in just the same way.”... Mr. Spiró has been a celebrated figure in Hungarian letters since the 1970s, but the remarkable “Captivity” (from 2005) is the first of his novels to be translated into English. You can read it as a parable of the Jewish condition amid the modern empires of Europe, or you can simply lose yourself in the ancient setting it so comprehensively describes.”—Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal, Best Books of 2015