Pleasures on the Periphery

PLEASURES on the PERIPHERY is a collection of authentic, occasionally surreal observations of life and work in the provinces of Sicily and People’s Hungary 1966-1970. The narrator was short of money, trying to survive like everyone else, very much out on his own – but through his work in a position to encounter a wide cross-section of society. Twenty years later he was one of a team assisting in the local transition from communism to democracy (‘Hello What?’) in the distant south of Hungary, supported by an EC grant. The concept of ‘socialism with a human face’ pervades many of the descriptions included in this book and acts as a recurrent theme in its vignettes.

The book includes a number of original photographs, and begins and ends with excursions to two non-peripheral places, London and the cloudy south-west of Poland.