In one chapter of my book Barcode, a Japanese border guard stands still like a « droid ». This was translated from Hungarian into German by an older gentleman who made the droid a « druid ». After publication, a German critic wrote me a message telling me that he had read the book and wondered what the hell a Celtic priest was doing as a Japanese border guard. The critic had a five-year-old running around with a toy lightsaber at home, so he immediately realized the druid was meant to be a droid. The translator had probably not been familiar with Star Wars.

I had a German reader report back that the symptoms of one of the characters in my book Pixel were more likely that of a frontal lobe brain tumor than a brain stem tumor. I was really grateful for it — I corrected it in the next edition of the original. Another reader wrote a letter in German complaining that a goat died in one chapter and that frogs were killed in another. He said that if I killed one more animal, he would stop reading my work because he was an animal rights activist. I often use animals as victims in my work, but I love animals and am an animal rights activist myself.

Many people in Hungary and abroad read a first-person perspective and assume the narrator is identical to the author. I like to collect and construct stories and rarely use purely autobiographical moments in my work. So it’s always surprising to me when readers assume that everything I write about has happened to me. A lady once remarked at a book signing in Paris that I must have had a very difficult life, because she thought that the fifteen different female narrators in Barcode were all me. A gentleman once brought me a very expensive bottle of champagne to console me for the same reason.