[..]

The central image of The Melancholy of Resistance is an enormous truck that moves at funereal pace through the half-lit streets of an obscure town in eastern Hungary. Contained within the truck is what is proclaimed to be The Worlds’ Largest Giant Whale, which is the ostensible attraction of the company that offers it to public view. But also aboard the truck is the real attraction, the evil Prince, a deformed creature whose followers are swayed by his doctrine of vengeful nihilism. These followers come from outlying villages and distant towns. They are gathered here to wreak havoc upon the remnant bourgeoisie who are living out a twilight existence in the last throes of political decomposition. The state is decomposing: things go topsy turvy. Trains arrive and leave and no-one knows when the next will arrive or what its destination might be. The smell of corruption and anarchy infect everything and the town where the Whale and the Prince have arrived has been thoroughly infected.

The characters whose fortunes we follow, characters who move infinitely slowly in this black comedy—a black which is as thick and sticky as treacle—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 (the only thing he is good for is delivering papers and amusing the locals in the pub at closing time); 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, a man to whose needs Valuska now tends by delivering him meals, doing his laundry and listening to his elegant but cynical monologues on the pointlessness of everything; and, above all, the monstrous Mrs Eszter, Eszter’s ambitious and mountaineous wife, whose moral zeal is indivorcible from her massive will to power which draws into its ambit the drunken Chief of Police who is also her lover, the vulture-like Harrer, who would, and eventually does, make a perfect secret policeman in Securitate mode, and a number of other dupes and intermediaries. Behind her, yet opposing her, is a terrifying anonymous man in a broadcloth coat who appears in this first extract from the beginning of the book, and recurs, dangerously, time and again, as a leader of the anarchic crowd.

The book is packed with detail, its sentences unwinding in long slow coils that hardly ever resolve themselves into paragraphs. Once the slow lava flow of the narrative begins, there is no break, no turning back, it surrounds the reader and pushes him along, much as the vast truck with the whale might move down the streets of the imagination. It is a dark and monumental work that the outstanding English-domiciled German novelist, W.G. Sebald, has compared to Gogol’s Dead Souls, and yet it is also funny; funny by virtue of its characters, its situations, its dialogue and its sheer slow pace, as a collapsing chimney stack is funny, as Oliver Hardy fiddling with his little tie is funny, the nonsense of ornamentation and deliberation allied to weightless yet physically heavy personae being, by its nature, funny.

It is in fact the book’s humour that prevents it sinking under its pessimism, its portentousness. The darker it gets the more wildly funny it becomes. Even at the very end when the reader is provided with a minute description in micro-biological or pathological terms of the decomposition of the body of one of the central characters, there is something funny about the juxtaposition of microcosm with macrocosm, about the portentousness of the human body and its rituals, something funny yet miraculous too in the way it echoes the Carbon episode in Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table, its existential absurdity and purposefulness.

For the translator, who has slaved four years over it— and to be fair this is still two years less than it took the author to write it—its finishing has represented a significant act of liberation, but when he looks at the vast black river of type his translation has released into English, he is very sorry to be leaving it too. Swimming in that treacly black river had made life madder and more palatial. The river had swept Valuska’s macrocosm of the stars along with the corpse’s microcosm of cells and proteins, it had set the ideal of world of musical harmonies against the demonic petty disharmonies of human ambition. It had showed him Eszter’s meditations on the proper relationship between a hammer and a nail at the point of swinging the former to bring it into contact with the latter. It had shown him three rats emerging in the dark recesses of Mrs Eszter’s bedroom, it had shown the Chief of Police’s two feral children in a draughty apartment block, it had introduced him to the languid army officer whose task it is to restore order to the benighted town, and whose fate it is to become Mrs Eszter’s virile lover.

For all this, the translator, and the reader in whichever language, have sufficient reason to be deeply grateful, much as they might be grateful for Gogol, for Dostoevsky, for Hieronymous Bosch, for Bruno Schulz, for Franz Kafka, for Tomi Ungerer, for all those medieval paintings of demons under misers’ beds or, in a different key, for Charles Baudelaire’s haggard and haunting Sept Vieillards. 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. ß

George Szirtes

[..]

She had long left behind the enigmatic square of the station forecourt, had passed the junction with Zöldág Road which led to the paediatric hospital, but not a soul did she encounter (meeting someone she knew might well be her salvation) below the bare wild chestnut trees of the unswervingly straight avenue, and beside the sound of her own breath, the light squeak of her footsteps and the humming of the wind in her face, she heard nothing, only the steady quiet puffing of what might have been some distant, unrecognizable machine whose sound vaguely reminded her of an ancient saw-mill. Although she continued to resist the force of circumstances which seemed to have been created expressly to challenge such resolution, in the complete absence of streetlight and the still oppressive silence she began to feel ever more like a victim cast to her fate, for wherever she looked seeking the filtered lights of apartments, the place assumed the look of all cities under siege, where, regarding all further effort as pointless and superfluous, the inhabitants had surrendered even the last traces of endangered human presence in the belief that while the streets and squares had been lost, the thick walls of buildings behind which they cowered afforded shelter from any serious harm. She trod the uneven surface of rubbish frozen to the pavements and had just passed the minimal display of the ORTOPÉD shop, a once popular showroom of the local shoe-manufacturing cooperative when, before crossing over the next junction, more out of habit than anything else (owing to the petrol shortage there hadn’t been much traffic even when she’d set out to visit her relatives), she took a glance down the darkness of Erdélyi Sándor Road which, because the closed precincts of the law court and the jail with their high, barbed wired topped walls ran along the length of it, was known by the locals simply as "Judgment Street". Down in its depths, around the artesian well, she glimpsed a clotted mass of shadows, a dumb group, who, it suddenly seemed to her, were silently beating someone. In her fright she immediately took to her heels, every now and then casting a look behind her, and only slackened her pace once she knew that the law-courts were far behind and that no-one had emerged to pursue her. No-one had emerged and no-one was following her, nothing disturbed the deathly calm of the deserted town, except the previously noted but now increasingly loud puffing, and in the terrifying ripeness of that silence, to which the unbroken quiet—round the artesian well where some crime, for what else could it be, was being committed—raised an echo (not a single cry for help, not the single smack of a blow) it no longer seemed strange that there should be so few stragglers about, though despite the almost quarantine like isolation of individuals in ordinary circumstances, she should by now have met one or two nighthawks like herself in a thoroughfare as broad and long as the Wenckheim Béla Avenue, especially so close to the city centre. Driven by her sense of foreboding, she hurried on, feeling ever more convinced that she was crossing some nightmare terrain permeated by evil, then, as she got ever closer to the source of that now clearly audible puffing, and through the bars of the wild chestnut trees could see the heap of machinery which produced it, she felt quite certain that, exhausted as she was by her struggles against the powers of terror, she was imagining, simply imagining everything, for what she saw in that first glance seemed not only stupefying but downright impossible. Not far from her, a spectral contraption was moving at melancholy pace through the winter night down the middle of the road—that is if this satanic conveyance whose desperately slow crawl in the direction of the town centre reminded her of a steam roller struggling to gain each centimetre of ground, could be said to be moving at all: it wasn’t even a matter of overcoming strong wind resistance on the normal road surface, but of ploughing through a tract of dense, refractory clay. Sheathed in blue corrugated iron and sealed on every side, the lorry, which reminded her of an enormous wagon, was covered with bright yellow writing (an indecipherable dark brown shape hovered at the centre of the inscriptions) and was much higher and longer—she noted incredulously—than those vast Turkish trucks that used to pass through town, and the whole shapeless hulk, which smelled vaguely of fish, was being drawn by a smoking, oily, and wholly antediluvian wreck of tractor which was making fearful exertions in the process. Once she caught up with it though, her curiosity overcame her fear and she paced along beside the vehicle for a while peering at the clumsy foreign letters—obviously the work of an inexpert hand—but even up close their meaning remained inscrutable ("could it be Slavic...or Turkish?..."), and it was impossible to say what purpose the thing served, or indeed what it was doing here at all in the very heart of this frosty windswept and deserted town—or even how it had managed to get here since, if this was its normal speed, it would have taken years for it to have made it from the nearest village, and it was hard to imagine (though there seemed no alternative) that it would have been brought in by rail. She lengthened her stride again and it was only once she had left the awesome juggernaut behind and glanced back that she spotted a heavily built and whiskered man with an indifferent expression on his face, wearing only a T-shirt on top, with a cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth, who—once he noticed her on the pavement—pulled a face and slowly raised his right hand from the wheel as if to greet the gaping figure outside. All this was highly unusual (to crown it all, it must have been rather overheated in the cabin for the mountain of flesh behind the wheel to feel so warm), and the more she kept glancing back at the vehicle as she moved away, the more exotic a monster did it seem, encapsulating in its appearance all that life had so recently thrown at her: the past, it seemed to say, was no longer what it had been but was crawling remorselessly ahead below the dark windows of the unsuspecting citizenry. From this moment she was convinced she was in the grip of a terrible nightmare, only there was no waking from this one: no, she was quite certain that it was reality, only more so; furthermore she realized that the chilling events in which she had been participant or to which she had been witness (the appearance of the phantasmagorical vehicle, the violence in Erdélyi Sándor Road, the lights going off with all the precision of an explosive device, the inhuman rabble in the station forecourt, and above all this, dominating everything, the cold unremitting stare of the figure in the broadcloth coat) were not merely the oppressive creations of her ever-troubled imagination, but part of a scheme so co-ordinated, so precise, that there could be no doubt of their purpose. At the same time she was constrained to make every effort to reject such an extraordinary fantasy, and she kept hoping that there might be some clear, however depressing, explanation for the mob, the weird truck, the outbreak of fighting, or, if for nothing else, for the extraordinary power cut that affected everything; all this she hoped because she couldn’t quite allow herself to lapse into a wholesale acceptance of a state of affairs so irrational as to permit the general security of the town to go down the sink together with every other sign of order. Sadly she had to forgo even this slim hope: for while the issue of the blacked out streetlamps remained unresolved, the destination of the truck with its terrible load, and the nature of that load, were not to remain a mystery for long. She had passed the house of the well known local celebrity, György Eszter, had left behind night noises of the park surrounding the old Wooden Theatre and had reached the tiny Lutheran church when her glance happened to light on a round advertising pillar: she stopped dead in her tracks, stepped closer, then simply stood, and, in case she had made a mistake, read and re-read the text which looked like the kind of thing a tramp from some outlying estate might scrawl, though a single perusal should have been enough since the poster which had obviously been freshly pasted over all the others and still showed traces of fresh paste at the edges, offered an explanation of sorts. She thought that if she could finally isolate one distinct element of the chaos, she would find it easier to orientate herself and so ("God forbid it should be necessary..!" of course) defend herself "in case of a total collapse", though the feeble light shed on this by the text only increased her anxiety, the problem all along having been that nothing seemed to provide the faintest shadow of an explanation of the whole cycle of events she had been forced to witness as victim or bystander, till now—as if that "feeble light" ("The worlds’ largest giant whale, mother natures’ secrat wondor") were all too much at once—when she was driven to speculate whether there might not be some firm, yet incomprehensible reason at work in this. Because, well a circus? Here?! When the end of the world was all too imminent? Fancy allowing such a nightmare menagerie, to say nothing of that evil-smelling beast, into the town? When the place is threatening enough as it is? Who has time for entertainments now, when we’re in a state of anarchy? What an idiotic joke! What a ridiculous cruel idea!... Or could it be... could it mean precisely that... that it was all over and it was all the same now? That someone... was "fiddling while Rome burned"?! She hurried away from the pillar and crossed the road. There was a row of two storey houses on that side, some with a faint light sifting through their windows. She gripped her handbag firmly and leaned into the wind. Reaching the last doorway she took a quick last look round, opened the door and locked it behind her. The banisters were icy cold. The palm tree, which had been the one jealously guarded splash of colour in the house—and which had been plainly beyond rescue even before her departure—was now most certainly past resuscitation, having frozen to death on the landing in winter. There was a suffocating silence around her. She had arrived. A slip of paper with a message on it had been stuck behind the handle of the door. She took the briefest glance at it, pulled a face then entered, turning the keys in both locks and immediately engaging the safety chain. She leaned leaned against the door and closed her eyes.