Miklós Györffy

Hot and Cool

 

The mass market for lowbrow fiction is a different kettle of fish, but there the pressure coming from international bestsellers has been so strong up until quite recently that the Hungarian producers of similar potboilers have tended to market their products under foreign - usually Anglo - American - sounding - pseudonyms to give their work a better chance. These trashy clone fiction titles, with garish covers, are indistinguishable from anything that can be purchased at airports and railway stations anywhere in the world.
I am going to deal here with three bestsellers that seem to be part of a new trend: books designed as a light read but with the action taking place in a specifically local setting and, above all, written with a specifically local accent. Hungarian film - makers have been trying their hand at a format of this kind for some time. Several recent box - office hits, such as A Kind of America, Moscow Square, Glass Tiger and Pirates, have devised a light, easy - going idiom for a new generation, itself taking its cue from foreign models. Zsuzsa Rácz's novel Hold Back Mother Theresa!, which quickly went through ten "editions" - so, at least, the blurb says - relies for its impact, at least in part, on adapting an imported model, its underlying proposition being based on Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones's Diary, which was highly successful in Hungary too. This too is a novel concerning a young, lonely, unmarried woman's determined search for a job and a mate, and Rácz tailors the model to a domestic setting, so skilfully and convincingly that its Hungarian readers, and of course the tens of thousands of young female readers in particular, can relate it directly to aspects of their own lives.
I do not recall having previously read anything, whether a novel or a piece of reportage, in which the radically new lifestyle and attitudes of the twenty - somethings who have come of age over the last decade is so effortlessly and neatly distilled. The first - person narrator moves around in a milieu that is her natural element, at every turn getting into situations that relate totally to the times that have passed since the change in régime. To anyone who did not grow up in this period, the world as viewed close up through this prism of its self - absorbed mundanity, which despite one's presumed familiarity with its general outlines, is likely to seem strange and remote.
Kata, the 29 - year - old protagonist, a former journalist who has somehow lost all her previous jobs, is interviewed by prospective bosses. Her best chance is to be engaged to run "training courses" for employees of their firms. A head - hunter puts her on display at Humanexpo, a trade show for human resource specialists, and delivers a lecture about her, as if she were an exhibit. On one occasion she obtains a temporary job running "communications workshops" for lorry drivers. Readers who made their acquaintance with the world of work during the era of state socialism will know little about what function is fulfilled by the "training sessions" that the characters in the book refer to with self - evident familiarity. In any event, our heroine herself would seem not to have too high an opinion about the market in humans:

...at a job interview in the first place you always have to make out you are enthusiastic and endlessly fascinated, go into ecstasies at the merest hint that you may be called on to do the payroll in a machine - tool works, or teach grammar to traffic wardens... And when they question you about family or career, are you perhaps planning a child, then you laugh devilishly: "Family???!! What's that when it's at home???

The firm must be the family - "let's be one big family" - and the firm's business interests are to be regarded as the family's most intimate concern. All this is already familiar enough from American films, but Mother Theresa offers staggeringly authentic testimony that it is now being widely aped in Hungary too - and with the backhandedness typical of those new to a game at that. She is selling herself in a market where qualifications count for little; a job seeker offers her personality, her inborn talents, as it were, and thus gambles these, as it were, in what is essentially a lottery. The odds may be stacked against her, but there is a chance she may win. If she lands a "training course", she will be able to quickly earn a tidy sum.
Though Kata does not own her own apartment, she is not on the breadline and, from time to time, is able to afford fashionable gear and expensive titbits, dine out in restaurants and do the rounds of clubs and other places. She has women friends, some of them wives and even mothers of her own age, but their main preoccupation, whether single or hitched, is to find a man. I have no idea what a feminist might make of this book, so very explicitly written for women as it is, but one sure take - home message is that these young, self - aware, self - sufficient single women have nothing else on their minds except how to catch a good - looking hunk with a flat stomach. They hunt for them on evening forays, lure them in internet chatrooms and through e - mails, but all the males they run into seem to be either ludicrously self - centred dickheads or neurotic wimps.
Kata calls herself Mother Theresa because, like that famous resident of Calcutta, she takes pity on, and wants to save, everyone she comes into contact with - sorry menfolk most of all - even though her efforts regularly misfire. She has an innate compulsion to help others: earlier on she had been an anti - drug activist and had written a book on drug addicts. One of the reasons why she issues herself the injunction of the title - Hold Back Mother Theresa! (enough of the sympathy and do - goodery ) - is that otherwise she is never going to get either a job or a man. (The title is, incidentally, also intended as a witty, though actually somewhat misplaced, reference to the title by which Brecht's play, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, is known in Hungarian.)
It is not hard to discern the author, Zsuzsa Rácz, behind the figure of Mother Theresa and the entries in the diary as representing the daily reality of her own life. She was once a radio reporter, and she wrote a book Kábítószeretet (Drug Love), and her novel came into being when she decided, all of a sudden, to sit down and write a day - by - day account of what was happening to her and around her, as though she were holding a reporter's microphone up to her own daily life. For that record to be interesting and authentic, of course, takes an appropriate mixture of personality and suavity, honesty and self - irony, but as a result it gives expression
to something that otherwise rarely gains form in prose. Whether this was prompted by a similar need to articulate unspoken and suppressed thoughts or is just a clever marketing gimmick on the part of an author blessed with managerial smarts is not my place to decide, but one notes that every Tuesday evening a public service radio station is now broadcasting a one - hour programme from a "Mother Theresa Club", which is a meeting place for those in search of happiness.
We are thus already seeing Mother Theresa spin - offs (a parody Hold Back Father Theresa! has been published) which all fits in with its being a barely concealed soap - opera saga. The adventures of Kata and her woman friends as they search for jobs and men succeed one another like the episodes of a soap: the characters become our acquaintances, which is why we are eager for ever - newer chapters of their story, which in principle are infinitely extendable and convertible into a branded franchise. For anyone who is looking for something else from literature, of course, the refreshing wash of self - oblivious chattering palls after a while; one gets bored with the repetitiveness of episodes that are cut to the same pattern and puts the book down before reaching the end. One already knows everything there is to know.

Miklós Györffy
reviews new fiction for this journal.