"The City Builder" is written as an interior monologue delivered by a city planner—a Socialist bureaucrat who lives and works in an "East-Central European city."…

The namelessness of speaker and city—besides possibly indicating a diminished individuality owing to East-Central European political circumstances—emphasizes the general pertinence of Konrád's theme, which is the bitter disappointments of middle age. East European Socialist middle age, true; but readers of diverse persuasions will recognize, if they don't also share, the planner's close attention to his aging body, his feeling of private and professional failure, his absorption in thoughts of death and of the sexual joys of the past. In fact, to an American reader the most exotic aspect of "The City Builder" is not its distant setting or its narrative eccentricity but the combination of a lavish metaphorical style with the structural forms and devices of classical rhetoric….

[The book consists of] interwoven fragments that range in tone from grim irony to nostalgia, and include reminiscence, indecipherable dreams, panoramic description, invective, and exhortation. Although he opens the book with daybreak and winds it up with a New Year's celebration, Konrád otherwise observes the conventions of interior monologue. Time doesn't move clockwise, and transitions are abrupt and often mysterious. (p. 141)

Konrád shows a taste and talent for the good old rhetorical devices (epanaphora, antistrophe, antithesis, antimetabole, and paradox …)…. [As] a method of controlling his flight from ordinary ways of saying things the traditional formulas work well….

[Whatever] its roots in the notably unsteady geography and history of Hungary, Konrád's mercurial prose has a likely and more immediate source in his belief in the destructiveness of worn-out words and ideas…. [The] following items, pulled apologetically out of context, may give a sense of how Konrád works his way through the platitudes of literature and life—successfully, I think, more often than not:

             the crocodiles of the unconscious
             shock troops of light
             locusts of my vanity
             the gladiolas of early-morning lucidity
             the latrine of the here and now
                                         (p. 142)

At times, I think, the accumulation of images leads to an impression of waste and windiness. At times, an abstraction seems stubbornly to resist a valiant assault…. Toward the end of his utopian oration—"The fragile structures of the city are regularly repeated messages from a misshapen void, aimed at our incorporeal mother who in the hall of possibilities plays a cheap little ditty about time and space"—it sounds as if Konrád had not completely defeated the cliché; or perhaps the messages from the void, the cheap little ditty reflect the hazards of translation. (p. 143)