Ács Margit - Élet a purgatóriumban

As children, we imagined that hell was below us, heaven above us, and purgatory in between. So here on earth. It is the scene of our sins and at the same time of penance. Sins? Sometimes we are not even aware of the pain we have caused, we do not realize that we have harmed someone, especially ourselves, or we have indifferently betrayed our faith, the moral Good. We mostly sin against those who are closest to us: parents, siblings, relatives, lovers, friends.
Boriska, or Borka, Bori, Borcsa, Borbála - during her long life everyone called her differently - grew up in a working-class district of Budapest, devastated by the war. His environment is unable to accommodate his instinctive intellectual needs and ambitions, and then the revolution of 1956 turns him definitively against the worker-family intoxicated by communist slogans. Wearing the stamp of "counter-revolutionary activity", he fights his way up into the elite intellectual circles without support or family background. But there, instead of the hoped-for homeliness, the betrayal of friends who were informers, self-blame due to mistakes made out of calculation and fear of career, love infidelity and so many previously unknown forms of human weakness await.
Yet these relationships fill the dreary days with beauty and meaning. The feeling of belonging keeps Boriska chained to her family throughout her life. A rich, proliferating, fulfilling life grows around him in the land of purgatory.
MARGIT ÁCS was born in Újpest in 1941, in a family of workers. He obtained a teacher's degree in Hungarian history from ELTE. He won a scholarship from the Szépirodalmi Könyvkiadó and worked as an editor at this publisher from 1964 to 1987, then continued his work at Magvető Kiadó until 1992. From 1992 to 2009, he was the column editor of Kortárs magazine. He began his writing career by publishing studies and reviews, and in 1976 he appeared with short stories, short stories, and short novels. In the 1990s and 2000s, he mainly published essays and studies in which he responded to changes and conflicts in public and literary life. He returned to narrative prose after 2009. In 2011, his series of short stories about the experiences of the period of system change that left a strong mark on people's lives was published. In the following decade, in addition to his work as a writer, he edited the monograph series "Close-ups of writers" published by the Hungarian Academy of Arts. Full member of the Hungarian Academy of Arts.