The Lines that...

Krisztina Tóth's stories are rich in their explosions of moments, bursting of silences, and an ambience drifting over fate, as if the author can notice even a flick of air. The interconnected lives, intersected flashes of memories, the difficulty of realizing a personal dilemma and individuality, and a transitioning sense of life and the boundaries that are not visible yet keep crossing over your life – the structure of this collection gathers storms and waves. The author mostly traverses back to the character's childhood memories and taps where there is heat, a discovery, a difficulty and therefore the transition, as if it was necessary to cross those rivers of crisis. Following the trajectories of the narrators, we find that, each time the author fabricates an end, we arrive not at similar points but at different zones of realization, trying to figure out the conundrum. The author has a fascination with breaking down the time and its elements, finding a rhythm in each of those.

As I watch the various shades of brown and grey, and the thick smoke swirling up from somewhere, I wonder where the boundary is, that borderline between life and non-life, between life and death, whether there is some kind of definite borderland at all. I wonder about the living and the dead, about how over the years I have learnt nothing, I've merely grown older,…

That's it, the story continues, because he knew that stories never end, they only break off and lie low, like latent diseases, and then resurface and continue to spread, resulting in stabs of pain elsewhere, only for that pain to be passed down from generation to generation.

The first story, Vacant People (Borderline) is composed in a personal grey zone. A woman in her thirties narrates a drifting experience and understanding of life and death, the living and the dead, the shiver and the warmth. In a seamless, almost plotless story, the impression is rather of an immersion into the foggy realities of life. You'll know when you read it. In The Pencil Case (Guidelines), there are two contrasting episodes from the narrator's school days, when the dissociation of the name and the self, of an observant and the participant, the futility of good and evil dawns upon the narrator as a revelation as if finding a clockwork of human expectations, humility and stillness. In Outline Map (Lifeline), as if a monologue of a sick boy, who might be perhaps on the verge of treatment (or dying?) and who has a short lifeline on his left palm, finds himself as if in a lost world, in almost a fever dream narrative. In The Fence (Blood Line), what begins as a recollection of an event when the pet dog got stuck and bloodied in a cat-flap, evolves as if the development of a negative of a scar left by the Hungarian Uprising of 1956 on the narrator's father's body.

The scenic details bring the past to life, while the momentary stops of reflection radiate philosophical exploration as if experienced by a younger self of one's own – by one who's reflecting. It is as if characters are able to switch off the present and take their soul out of their bodies and place it elsewhere for a while. There are characters breaking sensible boundaries and finding their way into a maze in their minds and thoughts. These stories are at times comical as well, in the dramatic turn of events.

In stories where Hungarian political history finds its trail, the strength of the prose has come even sharper, as if we are in the middle of a developing novel. The transition from lightheartedness to dark horrors and realizations in these stories are exciting if read as a technique, but they are also subtleties that represent the complexity of characters and therefore of human lives. The absurd becoming the real, the solitude turning into a sad beauty, and chaotic life becoming a norm - we find the grey ambience turning into a heart of survival. The portrayals of old women are so authentic and vivid, we'll immediately recognize them as someone from around us, breathing in the text – the clear detailing are as such you want to embrace them.

In Ant Map (Line of Passage), the narrator, an unnamed and uncared-for young little girl is left with a scrap collector grandmother who'd draw the trajectory of ant's movement on a map. In The Castle (Frontline), the narrator recalls her summer camp to a castle as a teenager, her fondness and the changes that crisscrossed and marked through those times and who lived then. A hyper-imaginative narrator's routine and comfort are disrupted after an American relative comes to stay at her home, and her teacher crosses a boundary in the Tepid Milk (Barcode Lines). Black Snowman (Grid Lines) transports us to the hubbub of the social estate housing boom in Hungary and the societal drama revolving around it, as witnessed and lived by our narrator. Cold Floor (Baseline) is in fact like one of the Japanese classic stories. While one of the most dramatic and dynamic stories is Take Five (Fault Line). As we progress in the collection, we find ourselves blending the experience of characters and almost believe that these in fact all are living in the same generation (perhaps the fall of the communist era in Hungary), through the same personal crisis, experiencing similar individual victories and losses. And the way, the first and the last story resonate, we exhale a sigh of relief, that the circle has been completed, that the characters have reached their destination, and that all living and dead have finally found peace.

One way or another, even if it sometimes come apart at the seams, the world is a web of often opaque laws, or of interconnections glistening like gossamer in the pale light of dawn, with the ends of each strand tied to a  different corner of time.

We tend to believe that these stories are particularly life and times of a young Hungarian girl, now remembered from a distant future. Dreams, hopes, musings and revelations of a young girl (there are male narrators too) – these stories give a sense of a journey of self-discovery through experience and observations, from close and far, from associations and dissociations with one's self. Stories also carry political, societal and pop-cultural aspirations of the time, and the evolution of our narrator's experience to live through those. In one of the stories, as if it is the final act in the catharsis of love – a woman burying love notes in Japan – we find elements of love, tragedy and renunciation. At times, we find the reclusive cover of simple imaginations that gives an escape to the narrators when in fact they are surrounded by clouds of existential crisis and happiness – losing self in the memories, and in the stillness. Transitioning identity and memory has been one of the leitmotifs of these thematic stories. The fleeting details of the surroundings, heat and even air and smell are crisp and passionately created as if they too are accomplices of the tipping points/lines that alienate you from being and the surroundings.

The borderline between life and death, guidelines between presence and absence, scar separating the trauma and the terror, line marking the coming of age, gridlines mapping the history and subtle horror, mirror lines of personal crisis, the line of betrayal and loss, line throbbing with memories, line separating sad reality and comforting fantasy, line between now and then – the commonalities of these stories lie in the separation that defines us in unique ways, at unique ages. Barcode is a visionary exploration of personal and universal experience. Taken together, these stories represent a grand realization and a sensitive candor to the lines that make, break, define and seek and soar redemption for life. These are fresh and bright prose, in line with the glory of Hungarian literature!

Author: Krisztina Tóth
Original Text: Hungarian
Translator: Peter Sherwood
Publisher: Jantar Publishing https://www.jantarpublishing.com/

Source: Review Copy from the Publisher

THE RAIN UPON US ALL

It's Raining In Moscow is a transporting novel about a Hungarian family in Romania. István Beczásy and his family are dispossessed of their national identities, and are robbed of their properties, and deported time and again, but they still endure to recount the history of survival. The novel spreads out in time and space, which links the fate of the family with Romanian-Hungarian politics under the communist regime – mostly after WWII. The author has magically used the narratives and voices: 1^st person, 3^rd person, Blackbird, Barn Owl, Dog, Bedbug, Cat, and Hemlock fir – all are compelling and give a unique perspective to look at the story and the world. If we ever fancy, how the plant and animal kingdom would remember our story, or recount it, perhaps this novel has fulfilled one such wish.  

The novel starts with a Chapter called Hunt 1947. The characters from this chapter will later be charged with treason by their own comrades. Then we move back in time to when István's great-grandfather acquires a vast stretch of forest from Prince Stirbey. Moulin Rouge (Cabaret); Counterfeit Francs; People's Court where István is tried; Domiciliu Obligatoriu (DO) forced on the family; Episode of Deportation; István's torture; A cat recounting the History; Iron Gate, and the Circus Finale – almost written in a stream of consciousness, all the chapters connect the dots of Beczásy's life – a representation of minorities living in Romania, 'many of whom were deported to labor camps in the Danube Delta.' (Dénes Sályi, hungarytoday.hu)

All I want is to eat, like everyone else. That's all. I completely subordinate my whereabouts to this life program: after all, life is too short to be anything but happy. – Bedbug

Wealth, glitz, money: these are not everything, because they are ephemeral, they come and go. True feelings, timeless human values, are far more important, for they last for ever and ever. – Bedbug

The Holocene came to an end when humans developed the potential to exterminate themselves, and went so far that they couldn't come up with any other means of preventing their own extinction butte extermination of the whole planet. – Cat

The story is also built around the tension of Transylvania – where minorities have always struggled throughout history. The novel is a Historical tour of minority lives in Romania under the communist regime, and a state suffering its own complexities of the power struggle, where people were treated not for their virtues and values but for being elites or traitors to the state – and the judgements were often morally corrupt.

Zsuzsa Selyem's novel is unique in narration, is almost a plotless historical, family, and personal adventure, and has voices, that can be overlooked, but what it has achieved cannot be forgotten. The first reading was not enough for me, in the second reading the puzzle was solved, and in the third reading, I recognized the art and immediately cherished it.

Author: Zsuzsa Selyem

Original Text: Hungarian

Translators: Erika Mihálycsa with Peter Sherwood
Publisher: Contra Mundum Press (https://www.contramundumpress.com)

Source: Review Copy from the Publisher 

Coming Soon...

Satantango 
by Laszlo Krasznahorkai

Translated from the Hungarian by George Szirtes

Coming Soon...

Autobiographies Of An Angel
by Gabor Schein

Translated from the Hungarian by Ottilie Mulzet

Street of Life

In pre-war Budapest three families who lived on Katalin street had a blissful beginning and sought a serene continuation. But caught in the misfortune brought by WWII, individual lives are displaced or killed, crumbling the connection and changing it forever. The lives and space around them disintegrated such that nothing could rekindle it back. Their relations were so strong that they couldn't be forgotten, so feeble that they couldn't be preserved and so absurd that it was hard to define. But at least love for each other was what connected them, and now dispossessed from Katalin street, whose shared recollection is rather painful—the guilt of having to lose and being alive alone devoid of former passion—has shadowed their internal spirit, especially of the four younger members belonging to the three families.

The novel opens in an apartment—social rehousing scheme under soviet/communist regime made them leave the house at Katalin Street—where everyday life of Elekes family continues. Their memories of the Katalin Street and the life they spent there, all those joys and mishap buried in the past keeps returning even after all these years. It's the upshot we're seeing in the lives of the Elekes family and Bálint. What follows is the backstory of these characters, and also of those who lived on Katalin Street. Members of the Elekes family have untold longing for the past, and each of them sees the others in that light. They try to maintain that nothing has changed, but time and again those same shared love and values direct their attitudes and behavior. All of them have accepted that something deeply rooted to their lives has been taken away, not merely the residence of Katalin Street but families that they felt like their own.

There came too the realization that advancing age had taken the past, which in childhood and early maturity had seemed to them so firmly rounded off and neatly parceled up, and ripped it open. Everything that had happened was still there, right up to the present, but now suddenly different. Time had shrunk to specific moments, important events to single episodes, familiar places to the mere backdrop to individual scenes, so that, in the end, they understood that of everything that had made up their lives thus far only one or two places, and a handful of moments, really mattered. Everything else was just so much wadding around their fragile existences, wood shavings stuffed into a trunk to protect the contents on the long journey to come. They had discovered too that the difference between the living and the dead is merely qualitative, that it doesn’t count for much. And they had learned that in everyone’s life there is only one person whose name can be cried out in the moment of death.

Irén (Eldest daughter of Mr. Elekes and Mrs. Elekes) and Bálint (Son of Major Biro), who were once passionate lovers and sought to get married, have developed sharp views of life, as if the former selves have been lost forever and they are not to ignore the changes they've gone through. For them the realities have blurred, and no new fascination will ever appear. They want to continue, however awkward they internally feel about each other and everything surrounding them, for the sake of one another. Bálint, once held in captivity by the regime, has trouble separating his experience and existence, and continues to live in and out of one or other of his memories. Blanka (Younger sister of Iren) now married and settled in far off Greek island, in her new life recreates and even alters the version of truth so as to be happy and safe, since all her life she has feared anything that doesn't suit her, and have resisted against them in unusual ways—the same thing that displaced her from the family. Henriette's (Daughter of Jewish family the Helds) ghost moving among them across time and space, watching them, recreates the Katalin Street again, resembling the old days and the unrealities that are real and palpable in her afterlife world. Blanka and the ghost of Henriette share a common trait of creating their own versions of past so that they could happily live with those memories.

Episodes from their childhood and while they were growing up to be become adult conveys how three families lived like one, and personal feelings and values they harbored for each other. Mr. & Mrs. Held and Major Biro are loosely drawn characters, and following their death they become even less significant figures in the story. Henriette's death caused in an unlikely episode is the key event in the lives of Balint, Iren and Blanka. They hadn't expected time will distort things around their lives that they wouldn't be able to nurture love amongst them. Irén, Bálint, Blanka and even dead Henriette relishes on living in and out of their past, keeping memories alive as if they are more important to them than the moments of the present.

Even after many things happened and disconcerted their private life and relation, Irén and Bálint believe they cannot separate themselves from each other, though little has remained of previous romantic fantasies. It's also because they share a common past, and that their moods and sentiments resemble each other. It feels like Iréne is self-boasting in her narrative about her character, especially in the light of her mother and sister, but the slow—chronological or sometimes even not—unfolding fits all things together. Her outspoken story of jealousy, envy, misapprehension, love and hate, providing personal vantage, all concludes to become feeling of guilt and loss in this decades tracing gloomy tragedy—an individual spectra traumatized by war.

Introversion is one of the traits of Elekes family. Whatever Irén says in her personal narrative, the other voice depicts her being the most sensitive and filled with love and pity for all the people she knew. She has always kept moral ideals above all else. She wanted to be happy and possess everything that mattered her most: love for her sister Blanka and the intimacy of Balint. While still living on Katalin Street members of the three families always tried to make things momentous and took care of each other whenever required but after the death of the Helds and Major Biro, those who survived discerned the fragility of things and people surrounding them, nevertheless unable to forget who and what is lost.

Katalin Street has the backdrop of the war ridden Budapest, occupied by Nazi in 1944, bombing and air raids in the background, social set up in threat—It's also the story of people who are stuck in time, and consider that the happiest things are all done, and whatever happens henceforth are mere the continuation of sense of absence and loss. In this regard, the novel has a darker tone that conveys, some people who have suffered loss because of war have turned into shadows living in present while their realities are still left in time. Trivial feelings, that cast an individual is also a character of the novel. There are many occasions when changing moods or behavior of a member in an unlikely situation make others feel awkward and bearing becomes more absurd thing, keeping them away from acting natural—escaping to solitude or coming to tears.

A tragedy filled with intricacies of relation and memory in the backdrop of war is the central theme of the novel, and it captures the sentiments of death and decay. Revisiting the past, trying to live the safe ideal life in the cores of memory and find solace to one's longing and comfort with almost futile attempts marks the lives of characters of Katalin Street.

Author: Magda Szabó

Translator:  Len Rix
Publisher: MacLehose Press
Page Count: 272

Price: $17.21