Zerkó, Attila's dwarf

"We wrote 453 after the birth of Christ. This is 1206 for the Romans, 1403 for the Berbers. I must have been about thirty-eight years old. I had become a man. In fact, my life was over. Everything important had already happened to me. But it would have been a shame if I had died. The best was yet to come." We are in the 5th century, in the time of King Attila the Hun. Humanity is racing towards its next apocalypse. The world is on fire, blood is spilled, empires are born and then fall. All over the world - from Rome to Constantinople, from Hippo to Mediolanum, from Catalaunum to Zentes - Huns, Western and Eastern Romans, Vandals, Goths, Scythians, Alans, Sarmatians, Gepids, Jews, Greeks (etc.) are running around (or staggering from fermented mare's milk, mead, Italian and Gallic wines or the táltos pipe) to push humanity from the old chaos into the new. The chronicler of the events is Zerkó, the Berber dwarf, who in the twilight of his life, snacking on coriander lamb and sipping a good Ikarion wine, tells his adventurous stories to the gaping pub crowd in a tavern in Cyprus. During his life, Zerkó was a slave and a god, a court clown and a prison thug, a circus spectacle and a male prostitute - and most of all, he witnessed the struggle between Rome, Byzantium and the Huns. András Cserna-Szabó's latest volume is an ancient picaresque novel, a grotesque road movie with a koumiss smell, a historical tableau and its parody - a world that is constantly burning to dust and always reviving from its ashes from the perspective of a small man.