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The narrator of the title story, "The Guest of Misleading Appearance", is an architect who invites some colleagues to dinner, among them the "structural engineer recently resettled from Switzerland," a bearded, stocky man who behaves aggressively. He returns after the others have left, continues to eat and then beats up his host, whose injuries are interpreted at the hospital as the result of a suicide attempt. Who is this "guest of misleading appearance"? A demon, who turns the protagonist against himself? But why from Switzerland, and why a structural engineer? Since Kafka, questions such as these have been asked of many writers. The archaeologist of "The Executioner's Daughter" thinks back on an alluring female colleague who, as the daughter of one of the "butchers" of 1956, enjoyed privileges in the Kádár era enabling her to be successful in her profession any real merit-a common occurrence in that period. She marries an old comrade-inarms of her "butcher" father. In comparison to his old colleague, the first-person narrator always draws the short straw. Following the arrival of democracy, all trace of the woman is lost when she moves abroad, and the first-person narrator meets on the bus a man whom he recognizes as the detective who in March 1957 carried off his father. In fact it is not the detective, but clearly his son. This conclusion (punchline?), though we may understand how it relates to the previous events, does not interconnect with them organically. It is an example of how in some of these stories the images, scenes, snippets of dreams and reality have an independent life, fulfilling their own narrative function and, while separately enthralling, of how they do not always merge into autonomous and consistent narrative unities. Oddly enough, with their breaks, their enigmas and what they leave unsaid, the shorter texts (in length closer to poems) are sometimes more poignant than the longer ones. In the longer stories readers may feel they have wandered into a labyrinth in which they have soon lost the thread. Again and again they have to turn back to retrieve it, which is not a burden, but rather an experience that offers new insights.
János Lackfi, born in 1971, has also made his mark as a poet and translator of poetry, and he too has turned to the novel. The cycle of thirteen chapters of Calling on the Dead may be in prose but the poet's methods and manner of seeing are clearly discernible. The branchings and variations on the theme are outlined by a first-person narrator describing his childhood; time doesn't pass and at the conclusion of the book we find ourselves essentially back where we started-at least if we don't consider as progress or development our becoming participants over the course of a genuinely enjoyable account of a clearly delimited situation in one life. Indeed why couldn't one consider a text that extends | not in "length", but in "breadth", giving a cross-section of a state of affairs, a novel? Obviously autobiographically inspired, the book is set in 1983 and tells of a twelveyear- old boy. He speaks about himself, his experiences in school, his teachers, his classmates, the pranks he plays with them, girls he is infatuated with (at times succesfully, at times not), his dog and dogs owned by others, his green belt suburb, his neighbours and parents, excursions and reveries. The subject matter is little more than provocatively and wilfully banal details; what is all important is the peculiarities of the narrative voice. Lackfi is a keen-eyed observer of this everyday world, of the stagnancy and pettiness of the Kádár era. That Lackfi succeeds in evoking this era authentically is due in no small part to the fact that nothing in the slightest bit unusual takes place around his hero, who can step beyond the horizon of the commonplace people of the suburb, the wretched children and the narrow-minded mentality of the school only in the reveries his reading inspires.
The real subject of Lackfi's novel is the language and the perspective which produces this grey and cramped world. The cunningly and wittily crafted narrative voice has two layers: the voice of the boy directly recounting events and the voice of the adult looking back on them. The two voices continuously intermingle, ironically mirroring one another. When the perspective is that of the boy, certain elements of the manner of speaking allude to this, while other elements hint at the adult depicting him with ironic aloofness:
Then winter came, I took Bagi the homework because I missed her, and when the teacher asked, come, who will be so kind, the boys whistled out my name, it was pretty awkward, blushing ear to ear I nodded, just let it end already. In the street where Kriszti's family lives I swore to step only in other people's tracks in the snow. That's the best way to hide where I've been, that way I can melt into nightfall. On the steep street up there were just one or two uninterrupted tracks of footprints left, the most clumsy of them those of the man with the hat. Didn't much see the man with the hat in winter, clearly must have taken shelter somewhere and wrought his plans. For a small guy he takes big strides forward, a fathom long, up the hill at that. Fearfully strong-legged man. Could only have gone to Bagi's, 'cos there are no more houses on the hill. Must be a regular visitor, sniffed out who my girlfriend is, planned how he could best squeeze me into a corner. He'll be sitting there on a chair, Bagi's mum, eyes red from crying, tied to another chair, he'll hold down the girl, pressing a sharp, curved knife to her throat, sit down, boy, I've got something to say to you, if her life is dear to you, don't try anything, 'cos I'll set her blood flowing straight away. |
