"The City Builder" is written as an interior monologue delivered by a city planner—a Socialist bureaucrat who lives and works in an "East-Central European city."…

The namelessness of speaker and city—besides possibly indicating a diminished individuality owing to East-Central European political circumstances—emphasizes the general pertinence of Konrád's theme, which is the bitter disappointments of middle age. East European Socialist middle age, true; but readers of diverse persuasions will recognize, if they don't also share, the planner's close attention to his aging body, his feeling of private and professional failure, his absorption in thoughts of death and of the sexual joys of the past. In fact, to an American reader the most exotic aspect of "The City Builder" is not its distant setting or its narrative eccentricity but the combination of a lavish metaphorical style with the structural forms and devices of classical rhetoric….

[The...