Telegram

Four humorous, grotesque and tragicomic stories, 'The Story of a Poem', 'The Poets', 'Telegram' and 'An Alcoholic Story', set in the second half of the twentieth century. Their heroes are intellectuals who never lived up to their learning or to their wish to be something else entirely, interpreters and connoisseurs of life. In 'The Poets', the teacher Ján Dobrovodský comes home slightly drunk and offended, ready for bold decisions, after his headmaster, an unsuccessful 56-year-old poet, has humiliated him for his lack of professionalism and spiritual emptiness. Parodied literary motifs and the mechanisms of the totalitarian era reach, openly or in hidden ways, into every part of their distorted but very human lives.

AI-generated summary

About the book

Form

Short stories

Length

117 pages in the original

Genres

Satire (assigned by AI)

First published

2009 by Koloman Kertész Bagala

Author's age

69 when first published

ISBN

9788081080166 (original)