Abstract This paper is about four contemporary Hungarian authors (Ádám Bodor, László
Darvasi, Zsolt Láng, and Miklós Mészöly) whose novels are interpreted as magical realists
by some critics due to the unnatural elements of story worlds and metafictional narrative
techniques they use. The novels are comparable also in the way they create fictional
worlds of a historical Central Europe depicting it as a borderland of cultural hybridity.
The main objective is to discern various textual strategies and narrative procedures
of “making magic” by using interpretative tools of magical realism, Todorov’s theory
of the literature of fantastic, and concepts of unnatural narratology. It also aims
to measure the capacity of resistance to naturalization of the different ways of making
magic in narration, to assess the relation between the unnatural in fiction and the
understanding of regional history, and to draw some more general insights regarding
the novels’ modes of narration and generic structure.
