Theme:  Eastern Europe

 
          

Hungary's literary icon, Antal Szerb, was an figure that rose to well-respected status quickly and whose life ended too early.  A Jew who died in a concentration camp in 1945, his last work, Oliver VII(1942), offers none of the dark and horrific circumstances that Hungarians Jews witnessed and withstood.  The wittiness of Szerb has been repeatedly compared to Luis Pirandello, the Italian playwright, but there is much more to Szerb than mere mimicry.  Oliver VII is a novel, Szerb's lightest by far, that takes on the theme of self-identity, self delusion and the perception of reality.  The story begins in the fictional Alturia, an unstable country where Oliver VII is king.  He plots a coup against his own government, escapes to Venice, and ends up impersonating himself.  As farcical as this sounds, perhaps too contrived and thin to carry a novel, it is not the case.


As Len Rix, the translator of Oliver VII points out in his afterword, this book holds the most weight when it is read in the context of his two previous novels The Pendragon Legend (1934) and Journey by Moonlightt (1937).  The Pendragon Legend introduced Szerb as a stylist of 'neo-frivolity' which was he immediately turned away from in the heavy and slightly morose Journey by Moonlight.  But the themes of his last two novels are the same, just dealt with in different ways.  As Journey by Moonlight has the philosophical and spiritual overtones that reflect the historical timbre of the times, Oliver VII, addresses those same themes in a humor fueled by resignation to the limits of the self and the world we live in.  Self-deception and identity are major players thematically, but in Oliver VII the reader gets to see how we can create our own reality even if we never truly know reality.  As confusing as this may seem, it is a question we often come to later in life through some time of self-examination and reflection.  As if Szerb wanted to reflect and re-examine his own work, Oliver VII is his answer to the questions he posed in Journey by Moonlight. 

Oliver VII is a king who is tired of confines of the life he has come to know and decides that the only way to escape is to plan his own coup and run off to Italy.  There he becomes comfortable as Oscar the trickster, falling in with a group of swindlers that include some ex-pats from his own country and some wily Italians.  The deeper he becomes involved in the duplicitous plots to trick innocents out of money, the more he rises to his own idea of leadership.  Ultimately, he impersonates himself to win back his won throne. It's a lovely, light read that asks of the reader nothing much but to enjoy, follow the twists and turns and to perhaps question the realities we have created and our roles in them.  As we follow Oliver VII through his identity slumming as Oscar, so too do we follow Szerb and his journey into himself and his style.  Szerb is in full control and we should expect no less from a man who was elected president of the Hungarian Literary Society.  His was a literary king in Hungary at a time when being a Jew was death sentence and even though he was offered many opportunities to leave his own country, his loyalty to his country, its literary history and culture and to his family prevailed.  He, a king in his own right, was put to death in  a labor camp in 1945.  And if you wonder what he means by "king", just a read a quote from from a Count who addresses Oliver in Oliver VII:

A king isn't required to be a human being like everyone else.  He must be the sort of human being who can inspire his contemporaries with awe and wonder.  You see, in the long, hard year that is the life of the ordinary man, the king is a red-letter day.  A holiday.  A lifting up of eyes in adoration to the sky.  There have been great kings who have achieved fame by destroying enemies abroad, and great kings who cared about the sort of chickens the peasantry cooked in their saucepans.  But none of that matters; it's not the point.  Deeds and good intentions don't confer royalty.  The king fulfills his duty as a great man simply by being.  Anyone can win win praise of his acts and achievements:  the sole duty of the king is to exist in the world.  Like a mountain.  My young friend, plains can be cultivated, ships can be carried on the backs of rivers, but mountains are the only things that rise, tall and silent, above the plains, rivers and nations of the world.  They simply stand there, and their existence directs man's attention to his eternal values.  If there were no mountains, and no kings, my young friends, people would think that everything in the world is flat, something merely to be exploited.  A king exists to draw people's attention to pure air of the peaks and the heights of destiny.  He is a legend incarnate, the one great comfort and reassurance.  That alone does more good for the country than fifty military barracks. It is a greater source of strength than fifty battleships.  And for him to raise a nation to the heights of destiny he needs to do nothing more than emanate that strange, merciful gift we call royalty.

Noteworthy

        

In the wake of Katheryn Bigelow winning Oscar after Oscar, it seems fitting that the author to win this year's fiction Best Translated Book Award is an woman and an Israeli.  And a woman also won for the poetry selection, a Russian woman at that.  Not nearly enough women are represented in contemporary literature, especially from countries such as Israel and Russian.  I am posting  the press release from Three Percent for the Best Translated Book Award 2010 to give a quick overview of each work.  I was unable to attend the awards ceremony this year, but I am sure it was exciting.  Held at the dreamy Idlewild Books(as if the ceremony wasn't enough, I am even more depressed that I didn't get to finally peruse the aisles at Idlewild), translators, critics, writers, and booksellers gathered to fete the incredibly rich offering from works around the world.  I am looking forward to posting some video of the event as soon as I get my hands on it.  Until then, know that I will post reviews of both works in the near future.  I can assure you all, dear readers, that it was one of the most difficult and provocative years for international literature and prove excruciating to choose a winner.  As with any decision that involves a passionate commitment to honor those that deserve to be recognized, it got tense.  But we feel we chose the best of the best.  Enjoy them immediately.

March10, 2010—Gail Hareven’s The Confessions of Noa Weber, translated from the Hebrew by Dalya Bilu and published by Melville House Press, and Elena Fanailova’s The Russian Version,translated from the Russian by Genya Turovskaya and Stephanie Sandler and published by Ugly Duckling Presse, are the recipients of this year’s Best Translated Book Awards for fiction and poetry, respectively. The announcement was made at a special award party at Idlewild Books, a New York City bookstore that specializes in travel books andinternational literature. Organized by Three Percent at the University of Rochester (www.rochester.edu/threepercent), the Best Translated Book Award is the only prize of its kind to honor the best original works of international literature and poetry published in the U.S. over the past year.

“It was very difficult choosing a winner from the ten fiction finalists,” said Chad W. Post, panelist and director of Three Percent and Open Letter Books. “There were four or five titles that we all would’ve been happy to see win. This just goes to show how many high-quality works are coming out in English translation.Over the past three years of the award, we’ve honored five different presses and works from five different languages. Despite the common laments about the paltry percentage of books published in America that originate elsewhere, it’s clear that there are a number of really excellent books from all corners of the globe making their way over here. That said, it’s a big night for both women writers and Brooklyn-based indie presses.”

 The Confessions of Noa Weber is the story of a middle-aged writer who married a man out of convenience (to escape her military duty) and continues to love him throughout the rest of her life, despite the fact that he leaves her for Russia, another woman, and a different life. Gail Hareven is the author of six novels and three short stories collections; Noa Weber is her first title to be published in English. Dalya Bilu is a well-known translator of Hebrew literature and has been awarded a number of prizes, including the Times Literary Supplement and Jewish Book Council Award for Hebrew-English Translation. Melville House Press—an independent publisher most well-known for its political titles and its “Art of the Novella” series—released this book in the spring of 2009 to great acclaim.

In addition to The Russian Version, Elena Fanailova is the author of four other poetry collections,which have earned her a reputation as one of Russia’s great contemporary voices. According to Idra Novey, chair of the Best Translated Book Award poetry panel, “The Russian Version obliterates the stereotype of what Great Russian Poetry should sound like. Fanailova has the candor and compassion of Akhmatova and a gift for striking metaphor that might bring Mandelstam to mind. She is also ruthlessly quick to fire ‘from the hip,’ as she says in the title poem, and her aim is impeccable.” Genya Turovskaya emigrated to the U.S. from the Ukraine and is a highly respected poet in her own right. Stephanie Sandler not only translates, but is a professor at Harvard’s Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies. Ugly Duckling Presse is a nonprofit, Brooklyn-based publishing house that is cherished for its exquisite book design and its aesthetically adventurous “Eastern European Poets Series,” of which this title is a part.

Noteworthy

Desert by Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio is a perfect example of why Le Clézio won the Nobel in 2008, even though he was little known in the United States –sprawling, place specific narratives that bring to life the histories of cultures we do not know and that the world is quickly forgetting.  One thing not to expect when you read Desert is a fast-paced narrative that immediately transplants you into another place and time.  It does take to another place, but in as low, slightly repetitive pace that moves like the Earth’s rotation.  A pace that you know is happening but don’t notice.  He begins the novel telling the story of Nour, fourteen year old boy who is part of a North African people, the Taureg, more commonly referred to as the blue men because of the sky blue robes that they wear to honor the father of their people.   In 1909, the French Colonialists are forcing the blue men out of their native land and into an aimless horrifying journey through the desert, led by their frail spiritual leader, Ma al-Aïnine. 

From the onset of the novel, there is the presence of an unnamed character, which is the Earth itself and all it’s natural elements. Throughout the novel, we learn Nour has a family – parents, sisters and brothers – and we learn of his staid character, his generous and loyal nature.  But mostly he is the observer, the eyes we see through as we watch this Berber tribe lose their land, their leader and their hope to ward off the superior warring efforts of the Christians.  Although, it’s the Earth that is just as prominent in the narrative being equal parts friend and enemy, and becoming a major character that only has allegiance to itself.  The Earth shows no favoritism. She provides food and water to sustain them yet also tortures them with unrelenting rugged terrains and a scorching sun that dehydrates and destroys.   Nour observes the toll of the journey and the effect of the elements on his people:

Standing by the side of the trail, he saw them walking slowly past, hardly lifting their legs, heavy with weariness.  They had emaciated gray faces, eyes shiny with fever.  Their lips were bleeding; their hands and chests were marked with wounds where the clotted blood had mixed with golden particles of dust.  The sun beat down on them as it did on the red stones of the path, and they received a real beating.  The women had no shoes, and their bare feet were burned form the sand and eaten away wit the salt.  But the most painful thing about them,the most disquieting thing that made pity rise in Nour’s breast, was their silence.  Not one of them spoke or sang.  No one cried or moaned. 

The close third person point-of-view by Le Clézio makes it difficult for us to not feel the effects of the sun, the scorching ground under our feet, the utter exhaustion that Nour and his people must endure.  To combat complete fatigue of the reader, he introduces Lalla, a young girl living in the slums of Tangier as a descendant of the blue men.  This is where nature becomes cleansing,vivifying and spiritual.  Lalla does not go to school.  She does not read or write.  Instead she wonders her countryside jumping dunes, laying on the white sand and running along with the wind, breathing in its rhythm and essence.  She lets the sun edify her, erasing her hunger and loneliness, inhaling it as if it were the source of life itself.  She befriends flies and  wasps, recognizing their role in the cycle of life and she finds comfort and solitude in the sea and the freedom it offers. 

But the voice is still murmuring, still fluttering inside of Lalla’s body.  It is only the voice of the wind, the voice of the sea, of the sand, voice of the light that dazzles and numbs people’s willpower.  It comes at the same time as the stranger’s gaze, it shatters and uproots everything on earth that resists it.  The in goes farther out, toward the horizon, gets lost out at sea on the mighty waves, it carries the clouds and the sand toward the rocky coasts on the other side of the sea, toward the vast deltas where the smokestacks of the refineries are burning.

Lalla lives with her Aunt Aamma.  Lalla’s parent died when she was young and what she knows of them is through Aamma.  Lalla has friends like the shepherd boy, the Hartani, who does not speak and the fisherman, Naman, who regales her stories of all the places where he has traveled.  There is al-Ser, which stands for the Secret, a spirit she visits in the middle of the desert who fills her with an overwhelming sense of well-being and becomes her spiritual guide. 

After an attempt by her aunt to arrange a marriage for her, Lalla leaves with the Hartani to escape her destiny.  The Hartani and Lalla become separated and Lalla ends up months later in Marseilles, where her aunt has already situated herself in one of the immigrant tenement housing projects.  Lalla finds work and befriends a gypsy teenager, Radicz, who steals for a living.  She is thrust in the eye of the public as the ethnic model, Hawa, after a photographer spots her in a café and she becomes his muse. She goes through life like the wind, without a true purpose, flowing in any direction that pulls her.  But the freedom and solitude that nature offers her are the only real things that compel her to thrive.  Eventually she returns to Tangier to give birth to the son of the Hartani in the vast landscape of Morocco with its promise of peace and independence. 

Le Clézio facilely creates the symbiotic relationship between the Taureg and nature.  Lalla and Nour listen to the earth for answers, sustenance and portents. The wind, the sun and the sea do not control their lives, but they pulse within their blood and live within their hearts.  This is what Le Clézio gives to the global readership, a perspective of a people that roamed the desert in search of their own land and their own traditions.  But the hunger for power slowly wipes clean the slate of ethnic diversity.  Desert is Le Clézio’s effort to give voice to the people who spoke through their journeys and through their respect for nature and through their silence, he makes hear how much they deserve a place on this Earth.

Desert

By J.M.G.Le Clézio

Translatedby C. Dickson

David R. Godine

336 pages,Hardcover

ISBN:9781567923865

$25.95

Noteworthy

This post originally appeared on Three Percent.

Abdourahman A. Waberi writes in his novel, In the United States of Africa, what many people in third world countries dream of—that they were born into the richest country in the world and had every advantage that Americans have. What is so captivating about this novel is its commitment to this idea, to realizing this dream in an imagined world,to re-imagining the context of race and politics. Immediately, the reader is struck by that concept—what would it be like if Africa were America and the United States and Europe were third world countries where the whiteness of your skin was a disadvantage, a mark of poverty and prejudice. To enrich this conceit, Waberi adds two characters,Yacuba and Maya. These two characters do not know each other or interact, but react to each others appearance according to their own backgrounds. Yacuba, a poor carpenter from the bowels of Europe,emigrates to Africa in search of a better life. Yacuba’s life does not improve; in fact, it hovers in the same misery and becomes even more miserable as he is opened up to the constant prejudices that he sees propagated against himself and his people daily in real life and in the media.

But most of the novel is told through the eyes of Maya,or at least, through the mind of Maya. Waberi chooses a removed second person, as if someone is telling Maya her history, her movements and her thoughts:

Ever since your mother’s illness,everything—your body and your mind, your dreams and your feelings—have been focused on death. You examine every sin, Maya, every word, every particle of darkness, every rumor you hear on the radio. Just yesterday, your were struck by a detail in a popular song written by our great lyric songwriter, the illustrious Robert Marley.

Maya,adopted when she was little by African doctor, is white and privileged.She never realized the color of her skin would be a problem until she went to school and other children made fun of her. Feeling out of place with the world she lives in, she goes in search of her mother. This leads her to the underbelly of France, ripe with the grit and grime of poverty and hopelessness. Maya (her real name is Malaika) encounters head on her prejudices but also the contrast of the color of her skin with her background.

Already the theater of your journey is set up in this corner of France. You have a solid advantage, Maya. As you very well know, you have the local color. As long as you don’t open your mouth, nobody can suspect your foreign status, the source of many privileges. You usually keep quiet or else you express yourself in elementary French, as correct as possible. You try to erase your accent, which sounds like it comes from far away, as it wasn’t easy to find a professor to teach you the rudiments of this language—your parents insisted you learn it, if only because of your personal history.

Subtle as this point is, it reverberates—imagine that your culture, your language, your customs were slowly and quickly dismissed because your country’s financial status didn’t have an impact on global economy. Who you are as an individual is wrapped up in the disregard of rich countries and their motivations. Waberi attempts to deliver this message with alternating turns of humor and emotion, leaving us to wonder what our roles are in all of this.

Equally impressive to the goal of this novel, is Waberi’s sense and use of language. He is lyrical and direct, both earthy and ethereal. In his language you sense the rugged landscape of his native Djibouti but also the fantastical lightness of its traditions. All this is served so well by the deft translation of David and Nicole Ball.

This novel is not perfect, but it is imperfect in a very acceptable and forgiving way. The lofty aim and the mechanics Waberi uses emphasize his talent as a writer and his responsibility as a writer. To make us think in a different way about the world we live in, but rarely question. For moral integrity alone, this book deserves to be on the Best Translated Book Award longlist.

Theme:  Eastern Europe

Perhaps you have asked yourself, as I have, where have all the good thinkers gone?  Where are the intellectuals?  Are they hiding under a table at a Parisian cafe refusing to give any thoughts on the state of the world today, much less a madeleine crumb of hope?  And where went the strong women writers who pen incisive social commentary without it lapsing into 'poor me, nobody dates the smart chick' collection of essays or a another 'poignant and brutally honest'  memoir about  addiction, childhood or a failed marriage? 

Well, step right up, ladies and gents, and meet Dubravka Ugresic.  Sure, the name may not be familiar to you, but it should be.  Born in the former Yugoslavia with a passport that states she is "Croatian" but now lives in Amsterdam, Ugresic is a world citizen.   Nobody's Home is a book of  essays that are tiny yet rich slices of a fresh baked reality cake.  There are to the point, funny and observant and leaving no ethnicity off limits.  This book is about 300 pages and I tore through it in ttwo days.  Ugresic's style reminds me of a well-trained athlete - no unnecessary movements, just the basics honed to perfection.  She does not waste a word.  But what are we talking about here?  Fashion, diets, relationships?  Ah, no.

Some of the topics Ugresic covers are: war, exile, flowers and communism, cultural identity, the memoir phenomenon, the concept of nationalism and sex trafficking.  I know, I know, but there are lots of women who write essays/columns that aren't about clothes, weight loss and dating the right man.  Maybe.  But more often than not, if they aren't about those things they are proponents of a particular political agenda pushing the feminist slant when it suits the cause.  Ugresic answers to no one and has no affiliation, just the affiliation of philosophy and thought-provoking reactions to society in general.  Here's a taste of her take on 'the European bazaar:

Europe is tired. During the twentieth century, Europe has spent itself on wars. ideologies, and Utopias.  Right now, Europe is doing what people are always happiest doing.  Europe is looking more and more like an open market, a yarmarka, a fair, a bazaar.  Money is the lingua franca of Europe and European unification.  Money is the most natural of languages.  There is a seller for everything, just as for everything there are buyers.  And while the ideologists of European unification are still tearing their hair out over a European identity (forgetting that identity is always articulated by contrast to an Other, which Europe has done with enthusiasm throughout its history), the European-ness of Europe is being determined by life itself.  the Chinese are settling Eastern Europe (Budapest has a China Town event though it hasn't been given the name officially), and Germans are buying summer houses in Sweden and Portugal.  The Dutch are snapping ip apartments in Moscow, the Serbs are buying in Budapest, the Italians in Croatia, the Muscovites in Italy...The migrations are not only moving North to South and East to West, as the demographers have feared they would, but also West to East, and South to North, and round and round in circles.  Dutch tomatoes, German yogurt, French cosmetics, Italian shoes.  Who could keep track of all that has occupied Eastern Europe?  The occupation is sensual, exciting and pleasurable; if it hadn't been, someone would have objected already.  Invisible money rustles, clinks, and pours from pocket to pocket.  While Europe's thinkers are searching for a harmonious formula for a new European-ness, America has virtually occupied Europe, promptly unifying the European East and the European West.

Similar differences in treatment exist between literature and--women's literature.  While literature gladly bears the burden of universalist values, women's literature wrestles with narrow, inborn specifics.  When women write about sex, for instance, their perspective is treated as female, while when men write about sex, their perspective is perceived as universal.  Although every writer is a "personality," "a self," in the practice of literary theory, literary history, and sociology, women writers are invariable "treated" in formations, in groups of two, three or four, especially if they come from small countries.  Two Bulgaria women writers, three Eastern European women writers...Gender-oriented female literary critics are seldom much help.  It turns out that a sisterly concern for the status of writing women has contributed to the promotion of women writers, but also to keeping the sisters ghettoized, with one difference--the ghetto has become more visible and loud.  The long-awaited right to create one's own self-definition in terms of gender, ethnicity, and race ultimately, in most cases, becomes a nightmare and a punishment.

But they know the crooked smile and also have been milkboys
before they got their wrinkles
and I'll walk on from West Bridge
I'll go in over the Central Station
I'll pass it in grey light and it will be lightly veiled
it will as always resemble an old tear-streaked film
and it will stab my heart as it always does
the usual alkies will there waiting for nothing
the young hitchhikers will stand there with the backpacks and their cartons of milk
hurried and harried people will wait for their connections
families will come with suitcases and baby carriages to take a weekend with the family in the country
and I'll stand in a corner and be overwhelmed
and not be able to do anything about it and not want it either
just be overwhelmed by all that life and the swarm
wet eyes without clear reason

Theme: Eastern Europe

                    


Gert Jonke is one of the preeminent authors who can create an illusion that slyly seduces the reader and then dismantles it right before our eyes leaving us to wonder what part of the fiction was fiction.  This may sound confusing or obtuse, and at times reading Jonke is just that - a confounding, vertiginous description of a story that turns the idea of story on its head.  Jonke died this year and I wanted to explore his place among the philosophical literary surrealists that include some of my favorites like Robert Walser and Gustave Flaubert. I began my Jonke journey with Homage to Czerny: Studies in Virtuoso Technique (translated by Jean M. Snook) which is comprised of two parts:  The Presence of Memory and Gradus and Parnassum.  Both of these are narrated by Fritz, a young composer who is struggling with the expectations of his talent.  We don't sense this as much in The Presence of Memory because although Fritz is the narrator, he is the unreliable narrator that witnesses a reality that we are not sure he is creating or he is describing.  It begins with Fritz attending an annual party of two siblings that he attended the year before.  The siblings, a brother and a sister, want to recreate the exact same party as last year, having the people saying the exact same things and doing the exact same things.  To facilitate this idea, they have hung paintings on the trees in the garden that are paintings of what they are hanging on so that it is difficult to determine art and reality.  The siblings, Diabelli and Johanna, make Fritz initially uncomfortable with this idea:

It wasn't so much Diabelli's stubborn insistence on being right that alienated me as it was Johanna's smugness; and when she spoke of the circumstances of our lives, she always hinted at a still prevalent but next to unrecognizable form of suppression, consisting of all of us repeatedly being used to our disadvantage--primarily to demonstrate to several other people, at our expense, that the reassuring feeling they have that all things they do behind our backs are an indispensable precondition of our continued existence is entirely justified--and yet, while she said that sort of thing, she believed herself to be free of the stereotypes of this kind of existence, in which she herself would use others, pointing out their dependence, especially when it was a matter of their dependence on her, to confirm her own independence, to which she unconditionally subordinated the events of her private life--for example, the coming party.

I suddenly saw her walking on the other side of the street, turning down an avenue that ran through the fields of snow towards the train station, and having seen her, I stood motionless--though not without casting a happily hopeful glance at her gently swaying figure moving through the rows of trees--until I saw that she was all ready to leave on a trip, exactly as arranged, that she was having a hard time carrying two large suitcases, and so I thought, well, I guess we'll still be going away together today on that trip we've been planning for so long, and naturally I was already looking forward to using all the different means of public transportation at our disposal, and so I finally began to run after her, of course I wanted to cross over to her side of the street to help her carry her luggage, but I was prevented from doing so by the traffic that suddenly seemed very busy at that intersection.  Unfortunately, she hadn't seen me, so she continued walking purposefully along the avenue, without turning around, and only then did I succeed in crossing the street and hurrying after her as quickly as I could, already out of breath, until in the middle of the road, I can't explain it, she had, there's no other way to put it, you know, because it was impossible that she could already have reached the station that was still miles ahead of us, she had vanished into thin air, or become invisible, you know, simply gone, yes, and even her footsteps in the freshly fallen snow on the sidewalk simply stopped where she had disappeared, didn't continue either doubled back or sideways, there were only two long wide fresh imprints from the suitcases she had put down, yes, at that point of her life everything about her that could have left any visible traces had come to an end.

Yes, I'll gladly believe you because even reality is often a good invention.

So it had turned out to be exactly the same party as last year, right down to the smallest details:  much as I could no longer tell which photos were from last year's party or which were from the party this year, it was exactly the same now with the pictures surfacing in my memory:  when I thought of moments or events from the party last year or the party this year, I couldn't tell the pictures apart, they were also turning up in twos in my head, absolutely identical silhouettes and chains of associations from both events:  when I thought over my worries about the party, I no longer had the faintest idea whether I was worrying about this year's party or last year's:  as though, in my head, both parties had been identically depicted, each on its owntransparent film and then laid over one another with all the elementscoinciding...

End of the line! the conductor yells;  I push my way out of the streetcar and proceed onward and upward to the university. as on every other day; everything seems at the moment to have run its course again, but while I am looking from a window in the corridor on the second floor how the sheen-glinting streetcar tracks, over ad pass the heat waves of which multicolored swarms of butterflies aflutter in a summer bursting forth now are skimming and are woven into the air of this day like a many-colored pattern, alive and whirling, one of those dimwit assistants whom I still have to put up with suddenly draws me off to the side and whispers with a hoarse voice into my ear:  I have a history of music for you; I'm holding a history of music for your use, so I think you should be grateful to me...Then he presses an envelope into my hand and vanishes into the nearest auditorium, awkwardly fleeing my glance as if he were embarrassed by me but at the same time even more for me.

It was almost as if I were touching the caryatid across the distance from me to her, as if I could already feel her very deeply without having to cleave the surging stream of air between us, to swim toward the shoreline of her voice so as to gather up some of the flotsam and jetsam of her scarcely begun sentences from the breakers of her glances, trained on me still and now suddenly dropping down over me like a veil.  It seemed to me that I was "hearing" something, although "hearing" wasn't the right word; rather, it was an iridescent flutter and shimmer of shadows twinkling through the district.

Theme: Eastern Europe

(Originally published on Three Percent)

Reading Ferenc Karinthy’s Metropole is like being lost in someone else’s nightmare where there are no exits. Karinthy creates an existential version of hell, stunning the reader not by blatant displays of horrifying circumstances, but by a gradual series of small failures that defeat and degrade the narrator and the reader. The narrator, Budai, takes the wrong door at the transit lounge and instead of going to Helsinki for a linguistics conference his final destination is an unknown city with an unknown language, an unknown nightmare.

Karinthy gives us no reprieve from the beginning. Budai is dropped off at an overcrowded hotel where, after he realizes he is not in Helsinki,decides that he will stay there until the next morning when he can go to the airport to catch a flight to Helsinki. And that’s when the never-ending lines begin. We wait with Budai in a long line until he finally reaches the ticket counter. After attempts to communicate with the receptionist in several languages—French, English, Finnish, Russian and German—he receives a room key after sacrificing his passport. And to another line we go with Budai, this time for the elevator. He spots a sign on the wall, written in the native language, that he attempts to find an identifying factor between this language and others—Cyrillic,Arabic, Chinese and Latin, but without any success. Oddly enough, Budai is able to recognize numbers and after stops on each floor and hoards of people getting on and off, he finds his floor and finally his room.The room resembles any other large city hotel room furnished with the usual bed, desk and bathroom. Since Budai has procured a bed for the night, hunger takes over and he ventures into the unknown city in search of sustenance. This is where Karinthy gives us description but no clues, as if Budai is an any man in a nameless city of the future where there is no distinguishable hint of a predominant ethnicity, just a conglomeration of all races. He waits in line at a restaurant while he tries to note any physical commonalities that might suggest people from a particular region:

Unfortunately there was a queue here too, quite a long one at that, because they only let in as many guests as were leaving so it was rather slow progress.He tried to size up others in the queue without drawing attention to himself. Some were white, some coloured; right in front of him were two coal-black, wire-haired, young men, a little further off an oriental-looking, pale-yellow woman with her daughter, but there were some tall Germanic types, one tubby Mediterranean gleaming with perspiration in his camel-coloured coat, a few brown-skinned Malays,some Arab or Semitic people, and a young redheaded woman with freckles in a blue woolen jumper, carrying a tennis racquet: it was hard to tell what race or shade formed the majority here, at least in front of the restaurant.

On the streets of this nameless‘mother city,’ Budai is pushed along, unable to resist the current created by the crowds moving around him. We continue on with Budai in his quest for food that morphs into a string of failures due to his inability to communicate with anyone. From the first, we feel the primal expressions of “the crowd” with its disregard for the individual, its coarseness and its brutality:

Back in his room he discovered that his body was covered in blue and green bruises from the blows he had received in the street when fighting hi sway through the crowd. He was not only bruised but tired and shocked to realize that he had not accomplished anything and had made no contact with anyone, neither with people back home, nor with people waiting for him at his destination. Neither at home nor at Helsinki would they have any idea where he had vanished. The strangest thing though was that he himself had no clue, not for the time being anyway: he was no wiser now than he had been on arriving here. Furthermore, he had no idea how he might set about finding out, about leaving, about where to go, about whom to speak to or what procedure to follow…He has a bad feeling and felt deeply uneasy, thinking he must have missed something or failed to do something, something he should have done but couldn't think what. He tried the phone again in his anxiety, fretfully dialing numbers anywhere, but it was late at night now, the phones kept ringing and only rarely did a sleepy voice respond and then in that peculiar,foreign-sounding, incomprehensible and indistinguishable language that sounded like stuttering.

And so it goes with Budai, a horrific stream of missed opportunities that lead to deeper isolation. And as readers, we are just as trapped as he is. The long,unsettling paragraphs of description we cannot turn away from because Karinthy leads us to believe that there might be hope just on the other side of the page. But there never is. We want so much to help Budai, help him find a way out, all the while being disconcerted that we know we would not fare any better in the same situation. We know that if he does not escape this city he will run out of money, which he does. We know that he will lose his hotel room because of this, which he does.We know that he will not get his passport back annihilating any chance of escape, which he doesn’t. We feel just as isolated and suffocated as Budai caught in an existential urban nightmare where we merely exist, but do not matter.

Written in 1970 and considered a modern classic in Europe, it is difficult to avoid comparing Karinthy to Kafka. It is, in fact, inevitable. Budai suffers humiliation,isolation, homelessness, loss of motivation, intellectual atrophy, brief imprisonment, loneliness that leads to lapses in his own morality, yet we never get to the apex of horror. Instead we drudge along on his degrading journey of imminent failures waiting for a moment of absolute despair or absolute hope. Because we never get either and so we encounter, ourselves, a sense of failure.

One element that seemed strangely absent from Metropole,is that Budai barely mentions his wife, his job, his friends. There is an obligatory nod to his past, but no time spent on what he misses about his former life, only the fact that he needs to escape where he is. Without this nostalgia or sentimentality, there is an even stronger sense of the dark night of the soul, an existential crisis that registers only with annoyance at where he is, but never to connect the reader with any real emotion of loss.

As a reader, we are drawn into Karinthy’s nightmare and Budai’s continual bad luck. For pure existential travails and societal anomie, this is a classic to be read. But I can’t help thinking, “What if Kafka had written it?”