The Law of White Spaces

These five haunting beautifully written stories set in an unnamed Hungarian city deal with doctors and patients in extreme situations. In Vera a disturbing tale of obsession an American physician doing relief work in post-WW II Hungary develops a morbid semi-erotic attachment to a epileptic mute 16-year-old girl. Determined to break her silence by any means he yields to violent impulses destroying his marriage and career. The title story profiles a doctor who swings between denial and terror at his worsening amnesia. In Clock of Life'' a desperately lonely septuagenarian whose amnesiac husband is half-mad from brain disease makes sexual advances to her physican whom she had known when he was a boy. Bahdy''s Disease depicts doctors'' ignorance and illness as symptoms of spiritual imbalance. In Choices an elderly widow decides to go on living rather than join her just-deceased husband in death or their son in Canada. Pressburger a Hungarian-born film director who lives in Italy provides a fascinating and often frightening look at the human condition in these elegantly translated tales.