Niki
  • Published: 15 February 2010
  • ISBN: 9781590173183
  • Imprint: NY Review Books
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 144
  • RRP: $32.99

Niki

The Story of a Dog

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“The Dog adopted the Ancsas in the spring of ’48”: so the story begins. The Ancsas are a middle-aged couple living on the outskirts of Budapest in a ruinous Hungary that is just beginning to wake up from the nightmare of World War II. The new Communist government promises to set things straight, and Mr. Ancsa, an engineer, is as eager to get to work building the future as he is to forget the past. The last thing he has time for is a little mongrel bitch, pregnant with her first litter. But Niki knows better, and before long she is part of the Ancsa household. The Ancsas even take her along with them when Mr. Ancsa’s new job requires a move to an apartment in the city.

Then Mr. Ancsa is swept up in a political crackdown—disappearing without a trace. For five years he does not return, five years of absence, silence, fear, and the constant struggle to survive—five years during which Mrs. Ancsa and Niki have only each other.

The story of Niki, an ordinary dog, and the Ancsas, a no less ordinary couple, is an extraordinarily touching, utterly unsentimental, parable about caring, kindness, and the endurance of love.
  • Published: 15 February 2010
  • ISBN: 9781590173183
  • Imprint: NY Review Books
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 144
  • RRP: $32.99
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About the author

Tibor Dery

Tibor Déry (1894–1977) was born in Budapest into a prosperous family of partly Jewish descent. In 1919, he joined the Communist Party and served in the ill-fated revolutionary government of Béla Kun, which collapsed before the end of the year. For much of the next fifteen years he lived in exile, returning to Hungary for good in 1935. Though initially well-regarded by Hungary’s post–World War II Communist government, by 1953 Déry had been expelled from the party for his criticism of its increasingly repressive policies. He then supported Imre Nagy’s reformist government and, after the Soviet suppression of the 1956 uprising, was sentenced to nine years in prison. Writers around the world (including Camus, Sartre, E.M. Forster, Rebecca West, and Alberto Moravia) rallied on his behalf, and in 1960 Déry was not only granted amnesty but allowed to publish and travel in relative freedom. Among Déry’s major works are Love and Other Stories, the novel The Unfinished Sentence, and an autobiography, No Verdict.

Praise for Niki

  • "The greatest depicter of human beings of our time." --Georg Lukács
  • "Déry was a dissenter, a subversive revolutionary...one of the greatest stylists in the history of Hungarian literature." --Péter Nádas
  • "Niki is a masterpiece, like Of Mice and Men, of the presentation of 'Man's inhumanity to man." --Richard Church
  • "One of the most prominent writers in Hungary." --NY Times
  • "In Niki there is nothing mawkish: one's heart is truly touched. By centering his seemingly artless story on the figure of a dog--that humblest, most poignant, and tenacious symbol of devotion, of the need to be attached--Tibor Déry has done more than present a contemporary political and human tragedy; he has illumined what might be called canine situation under the aspect of eternity." --Rosamond Lehmann
  • "The strains of making fiction under...pressure show everywhere in Niki: it's a tiny story, but told, for all it's simplicity, with a strange effect of density, as if it is compressed under a great weight." --Cambridge Quarterly
  • "...a tender allegory of the years of postwar repression in Hungary." --Observer

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