Click Here To Purchase From Amazon From the Rill to the Ocean

Author: Imre Kalanyos

ISBN: 9781425735494

The aspiration which led Imre Kalanyos run away from the imposing communist rule of his country is a word that equals life for many of us: freedom. In his short book From the Rill to the Ocean: My Journey to Freedom (Xlibris Corporation, Philadelphia, 2007), Kalanyos compares his life in communist Hungary as chained and desperate for an outlet into the free world. His quest for seeking identity as a free individual deserving equal respect as other members of the society led him to escape from Hungary and make his way to America.

Kalanyos’s true story reflects all the major elements of a straightforward and honest life: family love, compassion for fellow humans and animals, and sorrow over one’s failure to help one’s society get over racial and linguistic prejudices. His account of communism’s failure to integrate various social classes into a harmonious whole is quite revealing. Kalanyos also moves the reader with his true life experiences with family and pets, particularly of his horse Wilma that, in the communist reign, changed from ‘my Wilma’ to ‘our Wilma’.

While From the Rill to the Ocean is a touching account in more than one way, its brevity gets in its way of attaining brilliance. Kalanyos’s account of his life on the whole, and particularly of his escape from Hungary, is too short to impart the full mimetic impact that wins a reader’s heart. More details would have made the work more substantive. Still, the book stands as quite good, containing Kalanyos’s family photos and a brief comparative note on some Indo-European languages.

The above review was contributed by:  Ernest Dempsey is the pen name of Karim Khan. A founding member of the World Audience Inc. (New York), Dempsey is the author of three books: The Biting Age, Islands of Illusion, and The Blue Fairy and Other Stories. He writes articles, professional book reviews, essays, and poetry. He is also an interviewer. Currently Dempsey is working on his fourth book.