György Spiró erläutert in einem Interview mit Erika Csontos auf der "Hungarian Literature Online" ausführlich seinen neuen in Ungarn viel besprochenen Roman "Gefangenschaft" (Fogság), eine vierbändige, 800 Seiten starke Rekonstruktion des Nahen Ostens im ersten Jahrhundert n. Chr., die ausführlich von der Kreuzigung Jesu bis zum Jüdisch-Römischen Krieg das jüdische Leben, Griechen, Römer und auch das beginnende Christentum schildert. In einer Passage des Gesprächs erläutert er, warum er diese Beschreibung über 4 Dekaden als Entwicklungsroman um ein zentrale Hauptgestalt names Uri angelegt hat:

"People are incapable of experiencing the sense of community any more, their life is not like that. Therefore they are unable to accept books written in a communal form. They prefer lyrical novels to epics. They experience the outer world as hostile, and if there is an absolute protagonist, they go with him. And they even prefer if the protagonist is the narrator himself who lectures to them. This gives ample space to the lyricization and the ideologization of prose. This is generally called postmodern, but it could as well be called sentimentalism. To put it differently: today people cannot read the Iliad – they can perhaps still read the Odyssey – but in their heart they desire Rousseau in whom they recognize themselves. So I thought I should create a mediocre figure who is sometimes up and sometimes down, like people – the readers – in general. Then I decided to endow him with some of my qualities and deficiencies, so that I could perhaps be able to guess his reactions, even though he experiences things that are foreign to me. I tried to guess, for example, what would have happened if I had been born short-sighted two thousand years ago..."

via: Eurozine