"For this nation the City Park in Pest commemorates the most glorious days of its history. Here in 1896, the Hungarians celebrated what some scholars said was the 1,000-year anniversary of the arrival of their ancestors in the present-day homeland (the exact month and day they've still not managed to work out)."

So muses Jerne, the narrator of The Finno-Ugrian Vampire. History isn't really history in Hungary, it's more like a strand of the evening news, alongside sport and stock market information. The recent attempted reburial of the novelist József Nyiro in his Transylvanian birthplace is the latest row in a furious polarisation in Hungarian society. Nyiro, a defrocked Catholic priest who died in 1953 in Spain, had worked with the Hungarian Nazis during the war.

This sparked a debate about whether art should be separated from the artist's behaviour (Nyiro's work is a folksy chronicle of the Hungarian minority in Transylvania). But it's also another episode in a long-running split in Hungarian society and intelligentsia that goes back to the end of the first world war, when a Soviet Republic set up in Budapest was crushed by the Austro-Hungarian Admiral Horthy.

On the one hand you have the so-called populist writers (crudely a code for fascists, yokels, dipsomaniacs), on the other the urbanist writers (crudely a code for communists, Jews, dipsomaniacs), although some figures managed to hang out in both camps. Very few didn't disgrace themselves by cosying up to one extreme or the other, but when you look at the country's situation, squeezed between Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union, moderation didn't seem to be a winning ticket.

The Finno-Ugrian Vampire, written in 2002, is Noémi Szécsi's first novel, and the first to appear in English. She has received many literary awards, and you can see why she has been so successful at home. It is, among other things, a clever satire on the whole notion of Hungarian-ness, nationalism and the stereotypes of Eastern Europe, as Jerne, a hereditary vampire, is encouraged by her grandmother to join the family business. "Unless you start sucking blood soon," says Grandma, "there'll be hell to pay. It's in your blood, as it were, but what would really motivate you is if you died. Until then you won't care how the days pass." "I do want to die, Grandma," responds Jerne  who is more interested in a literary career  "but not just yet."

It's appropriate that The Finno-Ugrian Vampire should be published by a new imprint, Stork Press, dedicated to championing "Central and Eastern European" writers to the British public (their debut line-up is two Poles, a Czech and Noémi Szécsi).

The vampire craze, which started in the middle of the 18th century, was fuelled by reports of the undead in Hungary and the blood-bathing of the Countess Bathory. Vlad "The Impaler" Dracul himself worked for the Hungarian warlord János Hunyadi, so this is the vampire theme returning to its home turf. But despite the strong association that Hungary and Transylvania have with vampirism in the Anglo-Saxon imagination, there is very little fiction written in Hungarian itself on the subject, and it was almost virgin territory for Szécsi. Fans of Stephenie Meyer's Twilight saga, however, not to mention the extensive vampire literature in English, may be disappointed to find that there's little blood-sucking or melodrama here, but a great deal about publishing, Oscar Wilde and a rabbit called Initiative.

The Finno-Ugrian Vampire is played for laughs (Jerne works in a vegetarian restaurant), many of them erudite. Even in translation it's clear that there are many jokes and allusions that a non-Magyar will miss. It would help to know something about the region  and that the Komi language is part of the small Finno-Ugrian language group, something that Jerne, like many Hungarians, is obsessed with. But most of the original humour comes across as Szécsi lampoons Hungary's intellectuals: "The other day, though, Oscar did ask whether I still had any literary ambitions. 'No,' I replied. 'I'm much too happy.'"

 Tibor Fischer's latest novel is Good to Be God (Alma).