For foreign readers, Balabán's work might represent an attractive mixture of the familiar and exotic.

Hasil knows that they might succumb to the cold and not make it. He prefers not to think about that eventuality and takes them along the forest trail. He’ll risk it. So long as the patrol times haven’t changed, they ought to make it.

Now, Tony lay on his back in the sick room in L 315, watching a fly on the ceiling. The fly was clearly bored. This was no surprise to Tony. He was bored too.

I wonder if she knows how to strangle a snake until it turns red, to take hold of it by the throat and give it a proper yanking? Because if she did, she would have no reason to take care of herself anymore, and wouldn’t have to worry that her makeup was expired, crusty, and peeling off in strips like the damp plaster of the building where she sits out every day.

This amazing business makes me feel almost feverish. It’s more amazing than the silver casket. It’s just as interesting and strange, this change of mine, this transformation, as the Dalai Lama’s reincarnation in my book about Tibet, although it’s got nothing to do with it at all.

You're coming and my fever rises. I've tasted this before. / I'll leap into the wafted air and go for blood.

But who today can judge? Whose fault it is that we have forsaken each other? Who cast this spell on us that, sitting over a glass of beer, we read each other’s lips like the deaf for the lost words of fraternity and solidarity?

It’s a table, and more than that it’s a hideout, an impregnable hideout. He’d be happy to see someone dare rise, approach, and address him: “Sir, I’ve had enough of you, get up, scram.”

I am the revolution in flats where glass cabinets with Bohemian crystal are moved into entryways so that the crystal may endure the revolution. When there’s shooting, the crystal rings softly, but endures.