HOT FIELDS

“Recently, as I was making my rounds, I came face to face with sensation – a gunshot that upset nearly every social stratum in a very large area. Here, I felt quite strange seeing that somehow, everyone had turned into a detective,” said Zsigmond Móricz in 1929, upon the publication of Hot Fields.

Through the story of László Avary’s murder, Móricz addresses the conflicts and problems of a changing world between the two world wars. The world he depicts (i.e. decadent gentry of the Nyírség region in North-Eastern Hungary) is full of values and beauty, but it has become nearly unsustainable by his time. It’s a perceptibly waning, sinking world, soon to be replaced by something new, a new Zeitgeist that whirls through this dusty world of yore. It is not by accident that sand plays such an emphatic role in the novel. “Like in the desert,” Móricz says, “there is sand settling over everything and eventually covering everything.” The other central motif, as the title suggests, is heat. Summer heat that does not cool even overnight, heat that comes to symbolise clearly and strongly the pent-up heat in people’s souls. The stifling outside is identical with the stifling felt inside: here, among us, a crime took place. A crime kept secret, not to be talked about, a crime that is to be sweated out.

Because the Avary murder is presented as suicide, which fuels the conflict and drives the plot. In order to assert certain interests and to cater to certain sentiments, some people attempt, even violently, to make it look as though Avary took his own life. But the public “turns detective”, as Móricz puts it, for reasons of conscience and also for fear since, as they say, till we have the murderer, everyone’s a murderer, including me and you.

Móricz’s high-contrast characters are drawn clearly and comprehensibly, they are full of feelings and life, and they grant an insight into the lives and mores of the full social spectrum of the day.

It’s a chronicle of an era and at the same time, a cherished drawing of a vanishing world; a detective story with murder, investigation, love and twists, and a truly great writer’s statement for posterity:

“When a crime takes place, all of mankind gets upset like a disturbed colony of bees, and it wants to get rid immediately of the gruesome and unbearable load of complicity.”