Captivity is set in the Roman Empire of the 1st century A.D. Its hero is a well-read, but na?ve Jewish boy called Uri, who travels to Jerusalem.
Spiró said he is not religious, and neither is the novel. Rather it show everyday life in a world where Christianity was spreading. Its main hero was a witness to many great events, though he wasn't able to gauge their significance, just as people today are incapable of judging the significance of the events in their own time.
Asked by a member of the audience after the reading why the book - at close to 800 pages - had not been published yet in English, Spiró said the literary historian, translator and Columbia University Professor Iván Sanders had translated three short excerpts from the novel and presented them to American publishers, "but nobody was interested in the book."
Perhaps the reason was its length, Spiró ventured. Though there are Hungarian writers who publish long works in English, these books only come to market after they have been published in Germany. The German market is the most important for Hungarian literature, he stressed.
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"I have never had even one of my works published in German or English, I'm totally unknown," Spiró said. "Perhaps I'm too old to be a writer in the United States, where publishers are interested in works by writers between 30 and 40 years old, those are the ones worth investing in, a 60-year-old writer is an unfortunate guy, a waste of good money."
Spiró will read from Captivity at the Hungarian Cultural Center in New York on Wednesday. Afterward, he will speak with Iván Sanders.
Source: Hungarian News Agency (MTI)
Photo: MTI
