With the skill of a social scientist, the compassion of a humanist, and the stylistic pyrotechnics of the avant-garde, Konrád [in The City Builder] outlines the political, social and economic history of an unnamed East European city….

Much of The City Builder reads like an extended essay, although it is profoundly literary. Its ideas arrive in language of extraordinary power and plasticity. Moreover, by constantly condensing and telescoping events, Konrád manages to pack a number of potential novels into his text. Alfred Kazin has said that novels cannot be written anymore, only scenarios. Eastern European novelists and film makers are particularly adept at schematic, elliptical modes of composition. Konrád merely hints at the specifics of time and place, yet each hint is crucial, for it evokes a state of mind and a way of life. The true protagonist of the novel is the city, whose main square, with its impressive public buildings and statuary, is a memorial to mock heroism and real suffering. The narrator finds his city at once cozy and confining, irreplaceable and detestable—"an Eastern European showcase of devastation and regeneration" that "can welcome its enemies with salt and bread and, having taken crash courses in the art of survival, change its greeting signs, statues, scapegoats—its history."

In his much-praised first novel, The Case Worker, Konrád already proved his stylistic agility. The City Builder is another bravura performance, though here, too, the verbal abandon, the stunning fusion of abstract and concrete, the tricky interplay of reality and fantasy add up to more than a self-conscious tour de force. Konrád has evidently learned a great deal from Joyce and the French nouveau roman, but like many technically accomplished East European avantgardists, he eschews the impersonality of modern fiction. In The City Builder, cynicism and quiet despair yield periodically to anguished litanies, appeals, exhortations….

For all his humanist sensibility and reformist zeal, Konrád excels at constructing scenes of concentrated cruelty. The highlights he offers from his city's history culminate invariably in sieges and slaughters. His main character as well as other figures who flit in and out of the narrative are survivors of various ordeals who like to think they have been chastened by their harrowing experiences but who realize with horror that they have only been brutalized by them. (p. 504)