Adventures in Hungarian Literature

I finished reading László Krasznahorkai’s novel The Melancholy of Resistance (previously mentioned here), over the weekend. It took quite a while for me to get into it, what with all those very long, serpentine sentences, strung into chapter-length paragraphs, punctuated ‘here and there’ by little islands of cliché, quotation, or reported speech in inverted commas, making for blocks of text that often presented a smooth, hard, uniform surface, the traversal of which could feel disconcertingly like a tiring (but rewarding) kind of ‘literary rock-climbing’. This is indeed a text which is, in its translator’s words, a slow lava flow of narrative; a vast black river of type. The book traces the strange events that follow the arrival of a circus troupe to a run-down provincial town in Eastern Hungary, the circus’ principal attraction, indeed its only ostensible attraction, being the preserved cadaver of ‘the biggest whale in the world’…

Here are some further remarks about the book by the translator of the English edition, George Szirtes, taken from a web-page which also includes an excerpt from its first chapter:

The characters whose fortunes we follow […] are the widow Mrs. Pflaum, a woman utterly fraught with chintz, operetta, houseplants and conserves; her son Valuska, to whom she refuses to speak, he having brought disgrace upon her by his simpleton nature, his hopeless nocturnal wanderings, his idolization of the planetary system and his general vagrancy […] György Eszter, once head of the music school but now bedbound in an Oblomov-like withdrawal from the futilities of the world and, indeed from music too, with its impossible system of imperfect harmonies, […] and, above all, the monstrous Mrs Eszter, Eszter’s ambitious wife, whose moral zeal is indivorcible from her massive will to power…

…The book is a vision. A dark entertainment. A diving bell at the bed of the black river situating itself in the drift of its extraordinary plankton, its weird, dying creatures. Though its theme is disharmony, it itself is constructed harmoniously, every part echoing every other part with a rickety efficiency that amplifies the dumb noises made by the vision’s underwater life. As the book begins, we are at a railway station with Mrs. Pflaum. Once we board the train, we enter the godforsaken town never again to leave it.

I couldn’t put it any better than that. Oddly enough I’m sure that Mrs. Pflaum was called Mrs. Plauf in the book that I read: maybe the name was changed to seem less alarming to those English-speakers unnerved by unfamiliar consonant-clusters. I can recommend this book wholeheartedly to anyone with a taste for heavyweight Central-European literature. I could add that it’s the best novel from the Hungarian I’ve ever read, but that would mean almost nothing, as the only other such I can recall reading is Sándor Márai’s over-rated book Embers.

It has occurred to me that I’ve read more of Hungarian poetry than prose, although there too my acquaintance is slight, and doubtless superficial, and the impressions I have of it skewed. Some brief fragments of it remain embedded in my unreliable memory, even though years have elapsed since I last read them:

To be Repeated Over and Over Again
I glance down at my shoe - and, there’s the lace!
This can’t be jail then, can it, in that case.

- György Petri.

Cold Wind
Unpeopled rock
My spine lying without memories,
Without me
In the extinct ashes of millions of years

Cold wind still blowing.

- János Pilinszky.

Not to mention the one by Tibor Zalán that begins the wind the night the endless snowfall which, as much as I have been unable to forget it, I can’t, alas, recall in its entirety. Instead, I offer here another example of this poet’s work, found at a further page courtesy of the Hungarian Quarterly:

Madam Today the Sky Is Starshooting…
madam today the sky is starshooting today once more
too much clotted blood in my mouth while you
dance to happy music I sink into thirsty sand
and dream of our endless lovemaking.
things could be bleaker that's for sure
by the time this poem's finished the day will have broken
you'll be already in a swooning sleep under tousled-hearted
cypresses death drills its tool between your parted thighs
the sky is starshooting madam today the woodland strays
from beneath our window the sad warmth from beneath our heads
my identity card expired my last extension expired too.
for police for love I'm the villain free to be whipped. like
murderers--dilettanti cast their dice on my cloak
on faraway shores dead listless girls strip and cover
my face with their shirts. just fine to be someone's memory
the tram soars above trees sleepily you fly there
and burst into tears when you casually glance down

- Tibor Zalán.