George Konrád's first book, "The Case Worker," was a fictive essay built with blocks of grotesque realism: the daily horrors of the lives of the poor and helpless, the deficient, abandoned, crazed and rejected…. Its thesis was that our urban culture grows more vacant of humane values in proportion to our power to process masses of people through a machinery designed to give them well-being….

Still, "The Case Worker" accepts love, is drenched in compassion as it offers a traditional humanist solution of the problem of human imperfection. Konrád sees that it is just the problem—the intolerable evil inherent in our defective human condition—that spurs the revolutionist, and infuriates the utopian planner. The source of our delusions, it perverts our brief residence here to a hell on earth. This becomes the theme of "The City Builder." Its narrator, the anonymous incarnation of our 20th-century's contradictions, reflects upon the fate of his nameless city—recognizably in Hungary.

The 10 chapters of "The City Builder" are a set of meditations composed with an unusual metaphorical density. They project a surreal compound of decades of brutal history evoked by the inexpugnable memories of the citizens of the city. This is a work of poetry, in fact. There are no characters; there is no plot. The sentences (amounting in the end to a sentence of damnation), are uttered by the architect, a social engineer whose thoughts portray the consciousness of conscience itself, within the span of four generations. (p. 13)

It is interesting to note that the women during these four generations wither and vanish from the private consciousness, to be replaced perhaps by a "you" to whom the narrator addresses his most poignant wishes and regrets. God being absent from our world, Konrád's persona has no choice but to speak to that now dead woman, one among the many suicides that haunt the living.

The City Builder's ruminations are essentially an outcry against the hypocrisy and murderous careerism of state bureaucrats who live under terror from above, against the absurdities of utopian dictatorship and the utterly immoral pretension of speaking in the name of the people.

But the importance of this brilliant book is not polemical. For Konrád, socialism is "what we live in; it is what was and is—not a goal, a disaster, an ideal, a law, or an aberration, but an East European present tense, a neatly proportioned order, an unfolding drama, the power play of interests, endowments, self-delusions and self-exposures, trials and failures…. We don't know it but live it. We programmed a system and it programmed us." (pp. 13, 21)

"The City Builder" is a beautiful, brave book, a work of the stoic imagination. It could only have come from a nation of ironists and visionaries who, in their impenetrable language, have built a great arena for themselves in their consciousness alone. Always crushed by despotisms of the Right and the Left, external and internal, somehow they have managed to speak not only to each other, but to us as well. (p. 21)