Books: Hind Thoughts

THE CITY BUILDER by George Konrád Translated by Ivan Sanders Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; 184 pages; $7.95

In The Case Worker (1974), Hungarian Novelist and Sociologist George Konrád examined a day in the life of a state welfare worker in Budapest. As a catalogue of human detritus, the novel was both powerful and disturbing; in its rapid-fire vignettes and tortured ruminations, it strained toward poetry. Konrád was justifiably praised as a promising new international voice and as something even more rare—a sociologist who can write.

Konrád's second novel again deals with a civil servant, an...

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