Happy Days in Hell, the masterpiece of the poet, journalist, translator and enfant terrible of the Hungarian letters of the twentieth century György Faludy (Budapest, 1910- 2006), is the thrilling account of fifteen years of the author's biography, comprising from his flight from Hungary (judicially persecuted by the philonazi government), in late 1938, until his departure from the Recsk labor camp, where he had been interned in 1949, among the thousands of detainees in the process of Lazsló Rajk, which was the blood baptism of Hungarian Stalinism. Published in English in 1962, the book was not published in Hungarian until 1989, after the fall of the communist regime. Philip Toynbee greeted the appearance of Happy Days in Hell, claiming that Faludy was "the kind of person we all wanted to be, apart from ourselves." It is obvious that the English critic did not refer to the biographica...read more