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Laszlo Krasznahorkai (1954)
Satantango (1985) is set in a decaying post-industrial dystopia. Superficially it is a satirical metaphor of derelict communist Hungary. But at the same time it feels like magic realism recast in postwar communist Eastern Europe. The first six chapters simply show the same 24 or 48 hours from different points of view. Then the messiah arrives and the chapters are numbered in reverse order. The novel offers a very pessimistic fresco of humanity. The rain that never stops is the ultimate allegory. The novel starts out as a depressing naturalist novel a` la Zola, then turns into a Beckett-ian "Waiting For Godot" with the naive helpless workers waiting for a mysterious figure, then it becomes a land-based version of "Ships of Fools", then it becomes a Kafka-esque allegory of impotence and helplessness, and it ends as a Calvino-esque narrative puzzle. In this novel the workers are gullible fools, not revolutionary heroes. In fact, the workers are first and foremost an amoral bunch. Their messiah is a spy who hates them all and transports then to an even worse hell than the one they have lived in so far. Their messiah is actually an executioner. However, the whole thing is concocted in the mind of a failed doctor, a loner who is permanently drunk; not exactly a flattering depiction of the literary author. Irimias and Petrina report to a bureaucrat, aware that their job is to provide information, but they are told that they are in the wrong office (a registrar of prostitutes). When they find the right office, a captain scolds them for leaving their job and gives them a permit valid for three days. We understand that they work as informers for the secret police. They walk into town and first meet the boy who spread the rumor about their death. It turns out that Irimias promised the boy that he could sleep with Schmidt's wife if he spread that rumor. The boy knows all the secrets of the town: that Mari sleeps with the bar owner, that Schmidt's wife sleeps with Futaki, that the headmaster masturbates... The Horgos boy says that his sister (singular) spends all the time spying on others. He tells them that Kraner and Schmidt are bringing the money. He tells them that the mill shut down and only his sisters (plural) go there, to whore. His family owes the landlord money and so his little sister stays with him. The retired doctor, an obese man, spends his time reading a book of geology, getting drunk, watching the town from the window and taking notes on what goes on, his goal to know everything. Kraner's wife is his maid but today she resigns. She tells her husband that the house of the doctor smells bad. The doctor is annoyed that now he will have to go out in person to do his shopping. He meditates that the mill's demise is causing the estate to die. He sees Futaki in Schmidt's house and sees that he's plotting something. He sees Halics' wife tell Schmidt's wife that something that causes a commotion (that Irimias and Petrina are live and back in town). Even if it's getting dark and it's still raining, he walks to the abandoned mill and finds the boy's two sisters, Mari and Juli, waiting for customers. They tell him that they prostitute themselves to take care of their criminal brother, of their little idiot sister Esti and of their mother, a drunk who demands that they give her all their money. He leaves the mill and sees Irimias, Petrina and the Horgos boy entering town. It is still raining. The doctor heads for the pub, gets drunk, falls comically into the mud scaring Esti, the little Horgos girl. He is rescued by Kelemen the driver (the one who saw Irimias and Petrina walking towards town and alerted the others). Some people congregate at the bar: Kerekes the farmer, Halics and his wife (Halics meditates on his own cowardice), the landlord, Kelemen the driver, etc. They are all waiting for Irimias and Patrina, somehow in awe. The landlord remembers that Irimias owed him money and thinks that he's a scoundrel. Schmidt's wife walks in. The landlord flirts with her, Halics' wife is jealous. We hear her stream of consciousness: she has slept with many men, but Irimias is the one who got her most excited. The retarded Esti has a secret refuge: a pigeon loft where she keeps her savings, the only place where she feels safe from her abusive drunk mother and her abusive elder brother Sanyi (the Horgos boy who invented the deaths of Irimias and Patrina). We learn that the Horgos boy's father died. Sanyi convinces Esti that there exists a money tree. Esti is happy that finally her brother shares a secret with her. To grow the money tree, Sanyi tells her, she has to use coins as seeds. He takes her to a place where she plants all her money. Esti goes to sleep happy that Sanyi finally treats her like a friend. The following day she wants to prove that she can do something extraordinary like he prompted her to, and she tortures and kills her cat. Every day she surveys the plot where they sowed the money tree and ony day she finds only a hole: someone stole the coins. She runs to Sanyi who makes fun of her. Of course, he stole the money. He insults her and scolds her. He sees that she has taken some rat poison from the barn and suspects that she wants to kill the entire family. She walks to the bar and witnesses the drunk doctor falling in the mud. But then she walks back to her dead cat, lies next to it and swallows a lethal dose of the poison, waiting for angels to come. Kelemen, Kerekes, Kraner and his wife, Halics, the bald and ugly headmaster, Futaki, Schmidt and the landlord are at the bar. All the men lust after Schmidt's wife. Kerekes plays the accordion and they all start dancing. Schmidt's wife thinks that Irimias is the only educated person in the region. Futaki falls in the mud and is rescued by landlord. Esti's mother comes looking for Esti, who has disappeared. Eventually everybody falls asleep but Kerekes keeps playing the accordion. Somehow this causes the spiders to get into a hectic degree of activity and they start laying cobwebs on everything and everybody. (The chapters of Part 2 are numbered in reverse, from 6 to 1, as if the narrative now moves backwards) Irimias and Petrina have reached the bar where the group is assembled: the Kraners, the Schmidts, the Halicses, Futaki and the headmaster. Irimias gives a lengthy speech, arguing that everybody is responsible for Esti's death, that the tragedy stems from the malaise that has paralyzed the town. He claims that he and Petrina arrived by chance there, on a mission to somewhere else. He is surprised to find that everybody still lives there. When he left, everybody has a dream to move somewhere else and to start a new project. Instead they are stuck there. Irimias claims to know how to resurrect the place and create a model economy. He is willing to abandon his mission and remain there. All he needs for his project is money. Starting with Futaki, everybody enthusiastically donates all their money to him. Irimias declare them free. Irimias tells him to meet him in Almassy Manor. Irimias, Petrina and the Hogos boy leave for Almassy Manor, that becomes the mythical promised land. Everybody (except the doctor, the landlord, Kerekes, and the Horgos women) gets ready to follow them. Futaki sees that Kraner and his wife are demolishing their home. He then see that Schmidt and his wife have done the same. The exodus begins, everybody cursing the years of misery that they spent there and dreaming of their new life at Almassy. Then they notice that the doctor didn't follow them. Kraner's wife is convinced that the doctor, left alone, will starve to death. Futaki is mesmerized that the doctor, who spends his day watching what is going on, didn't notice that almost everybody abandoned the town. Schmidt's wife is transfixed by Irimias' intervention in their lives. They walk until evening on the muddy road to Almassy and then camp in the ruins. The Horgos boy (we learn his name is Sandor) is proud to be accepted by Irimias. Petrina suggests to Irimias that they should run away quickly before the dumb fools realize they have been robbed, but Irimias has different plans. Suddenly they hear a church organ humming in the rain and they see white veils appear and diasppear magically. They see the ruins of a building and hear people partying but see nobody. Petrina, terrified, falls in the mud twice. Then they see a white corpse floating in the wind and flying to the clouds. We learn that Esti has been dead for two days. Once the apparitions and the sounds are gone, Irimias, Petrina and the Horgos boy decide that it's all been just a hallucination in the fog. But Irimias is tense and even punches his loyal Petrina. Finally they reach a crowded bar where barman Weisz recognizes and welcomes Irimias. Weisz tells Irimias that horses have escaped from the slaughterhouse. The trio leaves the bar and walks into the deserted streets until they run into the horses. They reach another bar, and Irimias sends someone to summon an old associate called Payer from which he wants to get some materials. The trio then sleeps at the bar. Before falling asleep, Petrina, still shocked by the ghostly events, says a prayer to God. Futaki's group wakes up at the meeting point, the ruined manor. They are cold, hungry and wet; and Irimias doesn't show up. They realize how stupid they have been to entrust Irimias with all their money, one year of work. They roam the ruined manor that was supposed to be their promised land. Particularly depresses is Schmidt's wife, who was dreaming of running away with Irimias. They become angry. Schmidt kicks Futaki in the face, breaking his nose. When they have already lost hope, Irimias does show up. He arrives with Petrina and the Horgon boy in a truck. He tells them that the project is delayed. They are to disperse and regroup later on. He promises to provide them with work during the time of separation. Irimias gives instructions to each of them where they are to head. Futaki is the only one to sense disaster: he is penniless, hungry and homeless, all his belongings reduced to just one suitcase. Irimias, Petrina and the Horgos boy return to town in the truck. Petrina doesn't know what Irimias is up to. He only heard Irimias order a truck, guns and explosives from Payer. An entire chapter is about two scribes organizing and rephrasing a report filed by Irimias about the group of workers, a report to be delivered to the captain met in the beginning. Irimias' description of the Schmidts, the Kraners, the Halicses is scathing and vulgar. Irimias clearly despised them, and in any case was working as an informer for the secret police. The doctor (who so far was always drunk) returns to the village in an ambulance. We now realize that he was hospitalized after that night when he fell in the mud. He has no idea where everybody is. He hears bells and immediately makes a note of it: there is no church nearby and he cannot explain the sound of bells. He starts writing down what the various people are doing, or, better, what he guesses they are doing in their homes, based on his detailed knowledge of their habits. He keeps a file for each inhabitant of the village. The doctor suddenly realizes that he knows what everybody is doing without seeing them doing it. He hears the bells again and starts walking towards the sound, galvanized by the idea that the bells herald a positive turn of events in his so far miserable life. He is led to a ruined chapel where he finds a small madman who cannot speak properly, and realizes that the crazy man has managed to restore the bell. He returns disappointed to his house, calling himself an idiot for having confused the sound of a madman for the sound of paradise. He resumes his work around the files of the inhabitants. He pulls out Futaki's file. He tries to find the right words to describe what Futaki is doing and eventually comes up with the sentence that opens this novel. And the novel resumes from where it had started (the first two pages are copied verbatim). The doctor is writing the novel that we just read. The novel is his bleak meditation on the Satanic nature of humanity. We are not told what Irimias intends to do with the explosives. Haboru es Haboru/War and War (1999)
Az Ellen llas Melankoliaja/ The Melancholy Of Resistance (1986) blends
Kafka's irrational spleen and omen,
Camus' existential pessimism,
Faulkner's black humor, Bulgakov's anarchic fantasies,
Garcia Marquez's magic realism,
Samuel Beckett's
"Stories and Texts for Nothing",
and James
Joyce's peripathetic epos.
And, like in Joyce's novels, the storytelling relies on very long and labyrinthine sentences, but here the unstructured, rambling, free-association stream of consciousness is in the third person.
Each of the character is an allegory in him/her/itself.
The whale, perhaps a symbol of doom, that towers over the story,
brings to mind Hobbes' treatise "The Leviathan" and Melville's novel "Moby Dick".
Janos Valuska is the idiot savant who wants to reach for the perfection of the heavens.
Gyorgy Eszter is the intellectual who, aiming to mirror in music the harmony of the spheres, is first fascinated by an alternative reality (Aristoxenus' system of tuning) but then realizes the value of tradition (the Werckmeister system of tuning).
People look up to him as the wise old man, when in fact he's just a mediocre failure and a tool for his wife (the politician) to seize power.
His wife is a practical, opportunistic politician who simply wants power.
The circus director is the showman, who represents entertainment, and claims that he has no influence on political events, but in reality it's him who brings the whale to town and it's his main act that inspires the rioters: art is more than just a representation of society, it can be the driver of social change.
Valuska's mom is the middle-class woman who has no aspiration other than social order but is helpless in the face of the forces of chaos that drive society.
The novel in the end pits the harmony of the heavens against the anarchy of
society: those who accept the chaos live happy, those who don't are condemned to
either death (Valuska's mom), madness (Valuska) or melancholy (Gyorgy).
Eszter sees signs everywhere that something momentous is about to happen: a water tower that suddenly wobbles, a broken church clock that suddenly starts to move again, a colossal poplar that collapses on a hotel, and the enormous wagon of the circus. It turns out that Mrs Eszter is the one who hired the circus. We also learn that she is having an affair with the police chief, an alcoholic widower with two boys. She is in turn romanced by Harrer, Valuska's landlord, an old flame who still lusts after her. Mrs Eszter carries a suitcase to Janos Valuska, convinced that Valuska will help her. However, she doesn't find him home. Valuska, a halfwit simpleton, is at the inn of Hagelmayer, where he usually spends his evening, entertaining the local drinkers with his stories about the motion of the heavens. This time he is preparing a pantomime to describe how the Earth orbits the Sun and the Moon orbits the Earth. He drafts three drunken regulars to impersonate the three celestial bodies and then makes them spin around each other, a reenactment of the dance of the celestial bodies. He explains the heavens in the tone of a "prophetic trance". Valuska knows that the townfolks perceive the circus as a bad omen, as a prelude to some kind of catastrophe. For weeks the town has been gripped in a state of melancholia. Valuska knows that everybody is expecting some kind of collapse to take place, and that people expect to transition from an unmemorable past to a treacherous future. A lenghty description of Valuska informs us that he is 35, that he is considered an idiot, that he has the mind of a child. Meanwhile, the town is filling with people coming from nearby villages to see the whale, but a curious silence looms over the village. Valuska is fascinated by the writing on the van of the whale, that he cannot understand. He buys a ticket and stands in live to see the giant whale. Then he walks home, performing like every night a full circle of the town. At home he is surprised to find Mrs Eszter with the suitcase. She has been waiting for him since the morning. She explains to Valuska that she wants to form a new political movement, but the townsfolk will follow her only if Gyorgy is the leader. Gyorgy's wife leaves Valuska the suitcase and a paper note. The suitcase contains laundry. A digression gives us background on Gyorgy. He is widely respected despite having isolated himself. One day he suddenly decided to confine himself to his bed. Valuska started as his meal provider, but had slowly become his servant and friend for the last eight years. Mrs Harrer provided cleaning services and delivered the gossip. Gyorgy views Valuska as an angel, and doesn't believe that Valuska's cosmos is the real cosmos, but rather a fiction of his angelic imagination. And Valuska represents the one-man audience to Gyorgy's philosophical ramblings. Valuska is excited at the idea that this project may convince Gyorgy to snap out of his torpor. Gyorgy is aware that, by lying in bed all the time, he is likely to develop a serious disease. He despises his wife (we learn that her name is Tunde) with whom he had lived for 30 years. Then one day as Frachberger the piano tuner was mumbling incoherent sentences to the piano strings, Gyorgy decided that the way to escape from the human decline into madness was to isolate himself, and kicked Tunde out. He decided to devote himself to the study of music, the closest thing to perfection. Inspired by Pythagoras, Gyorgy had taken to write mathematical formulas to explain the power of the musical language. He had rediscovered the ancient musical tuning of Pythagoras and Aristoxenus (equal temperament), which he views as stemming from a mathematical understanding of the heavenly harmonies, as opposed to Andreas Werckmeister's modern tuning, and draws profound philosophical conclusions from the evolution of musical tuning: to him, music has become a misleading denial of the sorry state of the world: "a barbiturate that functioned as an opiate". So Gyorgy developed an alternative system of tuning. Unfortunately this resulted in deadful sounds. His custom-tuned, "purer" piano turned pieces of Bach's "Well-tempered Clavier" into cacophony. Throughout those 30 years Gyorgy feared the return of his wife Tunde. Now Valuska present him with the suitcase full of laundry and the paper note. Gyorgy finds Tunde's clothes mixed with his in the suitcase and realizes that it means: that she wants to return. The paper note describes her proposed political movement: she demands that he helps her jumpstart a new political movement or... she'll return to live with him. He dislikes her so much that Gyorgy gets up. He can't even walk properly anymore, but, assisted by Valuska, he sets out to announce the new political movement to the townsfolk. Unfortunately just about everybody is at the circus. He sees cats and rubbish. Nobody has been picking up the garbage, another sign of collapse. Valuska is telling Gyorgy about the whale and the hundreds of strangers who have come to see it, but Gyorgy is focused on walking without falling. They run into three people, notably the butcher and poet of the town, Nabadan, who start complaining about the general decline of the town. We learn that telephones stopped working. Gyorgy tells them that he is starting a political movement to restore hope and the trio receives the news enthusiastically. Gyorgy has no desire to see the whale and slowly returns home alone, while Janos Valuska stays until the circus director in person comes out to tell the crowd that the show is over for the day. Valuska returns to Mrs Eszter's home to report about his mission with Gyorgy, and finds the woman in a tense meeting with the mayor and the police chief. They are all anxiously waiting for Harrer, who has been shipped to deliver some kind of message. Mrs Eszter asks Valuska to walk back to the square and then report on the situation. Valuska ends up inside the circus and witnesses a conversation between the director and The Prince, a mysterious figure who uses an interpreter. The director tries to keep the Prince from showing himself, but the Prince cannot be constrained. The director fears that the Prince will cause a riot. Valuska is now assailed by fear. The circus, that he originally viewed as a positive event, now appears to him as a threat. Valuska rushes back to report what he heard to Mrs Eszter but arrives after Harrer who tells them that the circus has accepted to leave town and the Prince will not appear. They don't listen to Valuska, but Valuska has heard what happened after Harrer left, that the Prince refused. Mrs Eszter instead dispatches Valuska to make sure that the police chief's children are ok. Shaken by the events, Valuska rings the bell at his mother's house but she rudely refuses to see him. Valuska, ignored by everybody, pays a visit to the chief's children and then mounts guard outside his friend Gyorgy's home, sensing danger. Suddenly, he is surrounded by strangers and captured. He looks up and can't see the sky anymore. Gyorgy is home. A long stream of consciousness describes his mood: he had been meditating about his life, his paranoid desire for security, and reached the conclusion that Valuska's devotion is what truly matters. His thoughts are interrupted by Mrs Harrer who breaks into the house in tears and relates how riots have erupted and the army has entered town to restore order. People have died and the circus is being blamed for the uprising. And Valuska is missing. At this news, Gyorgy rushes out of the house. The violence spirals out of control, and the mob sets on fire the movie theater, a church, the hospital. Valuska joins the rioters and undergoes a transformation. He is no longer a naive angel but a cynical nihilist. He finds the notebook of one of the rioters and reads a diary of senseless and cruel violence. Feeling that he is being hunted by the soldiers, Valuska flees. He runs into Harrer who tells him that Mrs Eszter sent him to protect him and advises Valuska to leave town following the railway. Valuska then runs into the chief's children who, abandoned by their father, are determined to follow him. Gyorgy is looking for Valuska everywhere and witnesses the devastation. He passes by the town's doctor, Provaznyik, who is examining a dead person: Mrs Plauf. Gyorgy makes the mistake to ask soldiers about Valuska and is arrested. He witnesses the interrogation of one of the rioters, who doesn't feel sorry about killing a child and says that the Prince's face is always covered. Suddenly, Harrer and Gyorgy's wife also appear at the police station, trying to intercede for him. Harrer reassures Gyorgy that Valuska is ok. The cops start interrogating the circus director, who claims that his circus has nothing to do with the riots. We now understand that the Prince is considered the chief agitator of the riots because his stage performance was indeed about a rebellion, but the circus director claims that the crowd misunderstood a stage performance for reality. The Prince is not even in town because he fled when the riots started. The circus director blames hotheads that keep following the circus from town to town. However, the trio of townfolks led by Nabadan shout that he's a liar and point out the strange events that occurred after the arrival of the circus, like the wobbling water tower and the clock that started moving again, proving in their opinion the diabolic nature of the circus. When she's finally allowed to speak, Gyorgy's wife makes a statement about Valuska's innocence and gains her husband's release. Gyorgy walks home and sets out to play Bach on his piano, but this time he uses the Werckmeister's tuning, which turns out to be a lot easier than Aristoxenus' tuning. Meanwhile, his wife is moving back in. Two weeks later Tunde Eszter has become the town's new leader, and Harrer has become her loyal assistant. Tunde is the one who invited the circus in town, but in the end benefits from the chaos that came with the chaos that ensued. We now learn of her machinations. She kept the police chief drunk so that he couldn't stop the rioting. She made sure that chaos got out of control and then presented herself to the colonel of the army as the one tough person who could control the town. She (who already had been Harrer's lover and the chief's lover) slept also with the colonel, Peter, and now rules the town in cahoots with him. The circus has been expelled, the whale is gone, and the Prince is still on the run. The police chief has been internet in a rehab clinic, and Valuska in a mental asylum. Her husband Gyorgy spends his days visiting Valuska at the mental asylum and otherwise avoids any contact with her. Mrs Eszter also presides over the funeral of Mrs Plauf and delivers a lengthy eulogy. The novel ends with a four-page description of Mrs Plauf s bodily decomposing with scientific details on the chemical forces at work, an ending that is both sarcastic, harrowing and poetic. A Theseus-altalanos (1993) |
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