Language/Literature paper by Köves, Margit
Roland Orcsik’s novel :Phantom commando (Accepted)
Type of Abstract (select): Paper presentationAbstract (max. 250 words):
My paper deals with Roand Orcsik’s 2016 novel Phantom commando that goes back the early 1990s, the time of the War in Yugoslavia. In the home front a Hungarian family is dealing with shortages waiting for unspeakable horrors to happen, building a fortress out of their house and storing food and water for months of survival. The novel presents six narratives by a family of three and their friends, relating how different generations, different linguistic and ethnic communities connect with each other.
The paper brings in two other novels Zoltán Danyi’s Dögeltakarító(Corpse remover) (2015) and Orsolya Bencsik’s Több élet (More Life)(2016) both dealing with this period as a generational experience.
Brief Professional Bio (max. 100 words):
Dr.Margit Köves has been teaching and working in India in 1983. She edited collections of Hungarian prose and poetry in Hindi and translated works by Hungarian authors jointly with Indian poets and translators, her last published translations in Hiindi are Petőfi’s Selected Poems (Szvadhínta, pjár) 2022 and János Vitéz (Yanosh Bahadur).
She has been working on Indian and Hungarian Cultural Encounters in the work Alexander Csoma de Kőrös, Ervin Baktay and Amrita Sher-Gil, and the writings of László Krasznahorkai, János Háy, Gábor Lanczkor and Roland Orcsik. She is teaching Hungarian in the Department of Slavonic and Finno-Ugrian Studies.