Ferenc Karinthy: Metropole, transl. George Szirtes, Telegram Books, 2007.
The book was originally published in 1970 in Hungary but needed over 35 years to get translated and published by a literary fiction imprint of Saqi Books (thus fitting into the indie publishers reading project). It’s been lurking on my Kindle for quite a while, and I finally took the opportunity to read it to fit with Stu’s Hungarian Lit Month initiative for this February.
Hungarian linguist Budai is on his way to a conference in Helsinki but gets on the wrong plane and ends up in a town and country where he can’t understand a word of the language, nor read the writing. He’s staying in a hotel where no one seems to understand any of the languages he attempts to use. The city is grey and constantly full of commuters, rude people pushing him aside with their elbows. The population is mixed, of all races, so he cannot even guess what continent he is on. He cannot find an airport or railway station, the maps make no sense to him. The only person who seems to show him any compassion is the girl operating the hotel lift, who might be called Epepe or maybe Pepet or Bebe or Tchetchetche… the fact that he can never quite catch or confirm her name is typical of this story of incomprehension. And maybe also a dig at the mentality of certain types of dominant cultures when deciding that a foreign name is too difficult to pronounce.
It’s an odd book: dystopian and disquieting, but also quite funny (and occasionally disturbing). It’s been compared to the nightmarish worlds of Kafka or Jose Saramago, but it also reminded me of the claustrophobic conditions with apparently no escape of On the Calculation of Volume by Solvej Balle. There is a lot of information about linguistics and writing which I personally enjoyed, given my own formation as a linguist, but which I can see might be a bit dull for other readers. I think the author is also making a little fun of the Hungarian language, because the way he describes this strange language sounds an awful lot like Hungarian might sound to people who’ve never heard it before.
It’s also a great metaphor for the culture shock experienced by expats I used to work with, when their attempts at using logic to settle into a new culture failed, because there was nothing familiar to which one might compare things, and none of the usual rules seemed to apply. The only complaint I have is that these scenes do feel a little repetitive – probably a deliberate stylistic choice.
The city itself naturally becomes one of the main characters in the story. It is vast and bewildering, possibly a metaphor for how urban sprawl is causing alienation.
The city spread over a plain into distances further than the eye could see. Whichever way he turned there was no end to it, nothing but houses and apartment blocks, streets, squares, towers, old and new quarters of town, mildewy storm-battered rented barracks and skyscrapers faced with modern marbles… and chimneys, chimneys everywhere he looked, chimneys like so many long-necked dragons stretching towards the sky…
Sounds like the view of Tokyo from a skyscraper (albeit with no chimneys). Gradually, the longer Budai stays in the city, he begins to notice all its shortcomings. This is another typical stage of culture shock – after the curiosity and anticipation of the honeymoon stage, then anger, depression and hostility of the rejection stage. But what he describes will be familiar to anyone living in a big city anywhere in the world.
Filth and mess everywhere – had it been like this from the beginning or had he simply not noticed? When the wind blew, as it was doing now, it lifted and carried the discarded wrappers and other rubbish with it… He noticed how many old people there seemed to be in town: lame, crippled, half and half-paralysed, they stumbled, lurched and staggered on sticks through the crowd… Waves of alien humanity regularly washed over them. Frail old grannies, sickly frightened little sparrow struggled against the overwhelming crowd, dragging their helpless bodies along… constantly being shoved aside, squashed and trodden on in the mêlée… Then there were the crazies, those who wriggled and babbled, who talked and muttered to themselves, the furious who screamed and roamed the streets uttering terrible cries… Then the mumbling beggars thrusting tins in front of passers-by, the moaning, the insane, the paralysed, the skeletal, the subnormal crawling on all fours – all of them full of the desire to live…
Despite Budai’s unlikeable, prickly nature, full of self-pity yet also prone to turn violent when feeling helpless, it’s hard not to feel some sympathy for him when things take a turn and he finds himself kicked out of his hotel. He sleeps rough on the streets, works as a labourer to make a tiny amount of money for food and, above all, for drink. These passages reminiscent of Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London show just how easy it is to reach rock bottom.
Having finished work Budai too took to the bar in the next street… It was part of his current way of life, after all, much more so than a clean shirt. Where was he to wash a shirt? His lack of resources also had him choosing between clean underwear and getting drunk, and it was in perfectly sober mood, after considerable thought, that he opted for the latter. His situation would have been simply intolerable without alcohol.
Having recently read several books about the immigrant experience, and how constant ill-treatment, poverty and poor living conditions make one an angry, selfish and ‘bad’ immigrant (see Drndic’s Canzone di Guerra, for example), I was not surprised to see Budai becoming hostile and aggressive. [Incidentally, last night I watched Enjoy Your Stay, a film about undocumented Filipino workers in a luxury Swiss resort, and that too raised the question of the point at which being a victim of exploitation forces you to lose your own humanity and exploit others in turn.]
Wherever he wandered in town – and now he was deliberately crossing roads against the lights – he strewed rubbish, trod over floral borders and generally sought to break as many rules as he could. He had convinced himself that such rules had nothing to do with him, that he did not belong here, that he was simply a foreigner, an alien. If someone pushed him in the crowd, as often happened, of course, he craftily kicked the person back, or hit him with his fists, or if he lacked the opportunity to do that immediately, kept following the guilty party until he caught up with him and was able to exact full revenge by beating, slapping, punching and tearing at him. When he passed an empty telephone box he would enter, tear off the receiver and crush it under his heel. He would kick over the rubbish bins people had put out in front of their houses and enjoy seeing the rubbish spill out. He would throw stones at windows at night and smash streetlights.
Budai then gets caught up in some kind of workers’ strike or revolution – of course, he has no idea what is going on but simply gets swept along by the crowd, participates in the siege of a building, even gets a gun pressed into his hand and is expected to shoot, and then finally witnesses some revenge scenes and executions, very much in the brutal style of Blindness by Jose Saramago. But the next day, everything seems to have been cleaned up and forgotten. This reminded me of the Tiananmen Square protests (I went to Beijing for the first time just a month or two after the events), but for the author it might have been a reference to the 1956 Hungarian uprising and how the memory of that was instantly suppressed. Those of us used to censorship tend to see elaborate political metaphors everywhere we go. What does emerge from his biography is that for the next 4 years after 1956, he gave up his journalistic activities and dedicated himself predominantly to translation.
Incidentally, the name of the novel in the original Hungarian is Epepe but I feel that the publishers were wise to use Metropole instead, partly because the city is a main character in the story, while Epepe is initially marginal and later on disappears from the story, and partly because the crowd scenes and huge tower blocks remind one of the Fritz Lang film Metropolis.
Wikipedia has the following rather intriguing entry about Karinthy Ferenc (Hungarian name order is the same as in the Far East – surname first, followed by first name): a Hungarian novelist, playwright, journalist, editor and translator, as well as a water polo champion.
George Szirtes is the translator and I’ve loved his poetry and translations for many years now. I believe he deliberately chose a slightly more old-fashioned vocabulary when translating this book, perhaps in keeping with the time it was written, but also giving it a certain timeless fable-like quality.
findingtimetowrite 