An exuberant decade of fictional innovation, experiment and reorientation, Hungarian fiction of the 1980s is represented here by four short novels, os novellas, by such outstanding practitioners as Ottlik, Mándy, Mészöly and Esterházy. Different as their works are in subject matter, focus, treatment and emphasis, they all share a distinctly modern, or postmodern, concern with the ethics and epistemology of the act of writing while conducting their fictional inquiry into the belief in the public power and the national efficacy of the word, a near-automatically assumed postulate for much earlier Hungarian writing. A skeptical inquiry and an analytical triumph, "A Hungarian Quartet" is, within its boundaries of fictional indirection, also a harbinger of, and witness to, recent changes in the public domain of the country.
