"Tranquility is a moving, emotionally complex, subtle, shocking novel..."--Los Angeles Times


Tranquility, the acclaimed third novel by Hungarian Attila Bartis, is simultaneously a private psychodrama and a portrait of the end of the Communist era. Reading it, “we arrive at ourselves, at our own obsessions, in our own silence,” writes Ilma Rakusa. A thirty-six-year-old writer struggles to escape his hellish, Oedipal inter dependency with his actress mother as Hungary’s Communist infrastructure collapses around him. One of the most psychologically dark and ironic novels to have emerged from contemporary Hungarian literature, it is also, as far as human psychology and political farce are concerned, one of the most illuminating.


Attila Bartis has been hailed by Hungarian readers as a maverick, unorthodox, and highly inventive postmodern writer. Tranquility is his first novel to appear in English.


Imre Goldstein has translated dozens of books and plays from the Hungarian. He is currently translating a three-volume novel by Péter Nádas.