Readers and writers blog

I fell in and out of sleep on my father’s shoulders and woke from one dreamy interlude to the sound of dogs barking. . .

The scene is Eastern Europe — the old Yugoslavia, to be precise — and the Varga family is fleeing west to Austria. It’s part of the narrative in the novel Sniper in the Mist, Chapter 2, which we present today in our fiction section.

It’s also drawn from the life of the author, Joseph Cigan, whose family made a similar escape to freedom in the 1950s when he was just a small child.

Father accelerated the pace to a double-time trot, pulling my now-exhausted mother by the sleeve of her long overcoat. We were crossing a field recently harvested with corn stalks vertically stacked in a circle against each other forming teepee-like cones scattered haphazardly in our path. My father stopped abruptly at one and, shifting some stalks to reveal the hollow space within, urged my mother to enter. He set the suitcase and me on the ground, entered the corn shelter pulling both in behind him and arranged the stalks to partially cover the entrance. Mother sat cross-legged with my sister in lap as the barking of the dogs gained in volume. . .

Those memories don’t fade. And the way Cigan writes about them, although in fiction, gives them a vividness that makes them real.

That’s not the only memory of the East that comes through the work of this Hungarian-American author. He also writes about his ethnicity with a freshness imbued with both poetry and logic found only in the best writers of any heritage:

Hungarians are an Asian people. Usually, I prefer the term ‘Oriental’ instead of the more politically correct ‘Asian.’ Notwithstanding the likelihood that the genesis of our use of ‘Oriental’ is firmly rooted in a cultural elitism manifest in the Eurocentric orientation of our compass, the Orient is undeniably to the east. It can also be argued, for that matter, that it is to the west, although it would require a much longer argument. Asian, although general, is still somehow too specific geographically. Oriental is much less defining and more intriguing, the difference, perhaps, between the earthy flavor of a dark roasted Arabica coffee and the ephemeral perfume of a Japanese green tea. Hungarians, though, are definitely Asian. Wild Scythian winds from the steppes of Central Asia tore the back door to Europe from its hinges, and howling through on their wiry overachieving ponies rode Attila the Hun and Arpad the Magyar.

This quality of writing is why, as we explained in our previous entry, we decided to serialize Cigan’s novel, his first. Again, as we explained, it’s not yet finished. We know at least eight or nine chapters are complete, but who knows where the book goes from there?

We just don’t care. We think what Cigan has written so far is well worth reading, and we’ve signed on for the ride.

We see Attila and Arpad, and we hope you do, too.

– Sid Leavitt