I was in the UK for London Book Fair last week and also spent two days in Cambridge with my older son. It was cold but sunny, and I’ve always felt that Cambridge is at its best in spring, when everything starts blooming riotously.
Of course we had a little saunter through the grounds of some of the colleges, including my son’s favourite in terms of architecture and gardens (aside from the one he is at): St John’s.
However, one of my favourite places in Cambridge is Kettle’s Yard – a dream home for an art collector couple called Jim and Helen Ede. Simple, but cosy, personal, beautiful.
The ground floor of the original house, three tiny workers’ cottages turned into one.
The loft space of the original house, what a lovely guestroom.
The plants on display (the pebbles, the shells and other odd items the couple had collected) added to the charm.
What a beautiful legacy: art, art books, precious objects and you can sit in every one of the original chairs.
Later on, the Edes extended their house, mostly so that they could share their collection with others.
The reason why I’m quite a bit behind with my reading for the International Booker longlist is because I rather foolishly embarked upon the two longest volumes at once.
Daniel Kehlmann: The Director, transl. Ross Benjamin, Riverrun, 2025
I actually read this one in the original German, because I found it in the library, so cannot pronounce myself about the translation (although my peer mentor and I are planning to work through some passages together over Zoom in the near future). However, it’s interesting that the hefty 464 pages of the original have been reduced to a more manageable 352 pages in English. That’s quite a gap, even though I fully accept that English is a more economical language than German, so I suspect that some passages (I believe the PG Wodehouse ones for example) may have been substantially reduced. Sadly, the original title ‘Lichtspiel’ was a lot more evocative and playful, it’s an older word often used in connection with early movies and could be translated as ‘play of light’ or ‘shadow play’ or ‘fluttering light’ or ‘photoplay’. That would give us more of a feel of the ambiguity of Austrian film director GW Pabst and his decision to return to Nazi Germany and continue making films there. ‘The Director’ is a far too literal and bland title.
And, sadly, that’s how I felt about the novel too. It has a series of entertaining vignettes – I particularly relished the opening scene with the former assistant (now suffering from dementia) being interviewed on TV and the meeting between Pabst and Goebbels – but overall it felt rather flat (some jokes and threats got repeated way too often, and no one has ever claimed that Kehlmann is a great prose stylist). Nor did I get that much of an insight of the psychological torture Pabst might have felt at the outset, as he compromises more and more, while at the end he seems to be nothing more than a shell of a man. Several of the other characters feel rather cliché when they make an appearance (Greta Garbo, Louise Brooks, the Hollywood producers, most of the Nazis). Perhaps I was too busy comparing it unfavourably to Julian Barnes’ fictionalised book on Shostakovich, which I thought did a much better job of describing the real dilemma of the artist trying to create art under dictatorial regimes.
Nevertheless, it was entertaining enough and I read it quite quickly, unlike the next one, which took me nearly two weeks to finish. Yet the second one was a decidedly better book both in terms of psychology and artistry. I believe The Director was published more than a year ago in the US but such is the strange nature of the International Booker eligibility that it is eligible this year as well, when it’s being published in the UK. Incidentally, while the American cover is a generic picture of a 1930s couple in front of a landscape, whatever happened to the UK cover? It’s absolutely dire.
Anjet Daanje: The Remembered Soldier, transl. David McKay, Scribe UK, 2025
Another book that has already been published in the US, and again with a much better cover, although this time it’s the UK cover that is terribly generic. In fact, it has already won the Republic of Consciousness Prize in 2025 and was shortlisted for the National Book Award in the US in 2025, so it does feel like the International Booker have come late to it or have not made much of an effort to discover something fresh or different. (Then again, last year I was complaining that they didn’t include obvious big hitters such as Olga Tokarczuk or Han Kang).
This one took me over two weeks to read, although it was far more poignant and beautifully written. One thing that did drive me bonkers was the endless repetition of ‘And…’ at the start of nearly every sentence and every paragraph. It’s supposed to create a sense of flow, I get it, but it felt like a stylistic flourish that merely exasperated me and took me out of the book. Also, all of the dialogue is rendered indirectly, another needlessly gimmicky device.
However, having got the grumbles out of the way, I have to admit I found the story deeply affecting. Four years after the First World War ended, former soldier Noon Merckem (thus-named because he was found at noon in the town of Merckem) is living in an asylum, because he has lost his memory. Countless women come to see him in the hope that he might turn out to be their long-missing husband, but they usually end up disappointed. Until one day Julienne appears and claims he is her photographer husband Amand. Almost against the advice of the doctors, they go home together and try to rebuild a life that remains alive only in one person’s remembrance. The ways in which they gradually learn to help and love each other, also occasionally distrust and hate each other, are described in subtle and very gradual, natural detail. Along the way, it’s not just Amand that starts having doubts whether his past life and marriage were really as idyllic as Julienne portrays them. The author doesn’t shy away from describing the horrors of war which return in the nightmares plaguing Noon/Amand, but there are also moments of happiness, lyrical, sun-filled descriptions of sitting by the river or riding a bicycle together. Daanje is excellent on close observation of a couple.
The book reminded me quite a bit of the film Phoenix by Christian Petzold (which was adapted from a French novel), although in that case it’s a missing wife who returns after the Second World War and she is not recognised by her husband. But it has the same mysterious and sad atmosphere, the same ambiguous resolution and memorable scenes.
And for days they circle each other like this, not that she avoids him, they are often together, he sits with her in the kitchen when she cooks, the two of them work in the studio together… and they try to find intimacy again, they talk, exchange glances, smile at each other, she rests her hand on his shoulder, he his hand on her back but every attempt runs aground on a poisonous mixture of inflated intentions, overwrought expectations, and doubts, and after a while, fresh disappointment and shame. How could it be that before the war they lived a life together effortlessly, and now, after eight years of waiting, it’s there for the taking yet it still eludes their grasp, it must be his fault, maybe a person needs a past to be happy, and there are also times he thinks it must be her, there’s something about her, something unnameable.
The saddest part of the book for me was when Amand feels that he might be losing his memory forever, and not even remember Julienne and their children, so they rehearse the story she is going to tell him about their life together, to try and remind him. This part is all about the power of storytelling and I’ve seen it recently in action with people suffering from dementia ‘as if they can use their carefully compiled past to outsmart life itself, and whatever happens, nothing can touch them as long as she memorizes the right words’.
I think The Remembered Soldier will almost certainly be shortlisted and indeed has a good chance of winning the International Booker. Not that sure about The Director.
I’m pretty sure I’ve handled this topic before, because at some point I was contemplating doing a loft conversion in my house in Maidenhead – I wanted to have my office and library up there. I’m glad I didn’t do it in the end, because it would have been very expensive and unlikely to be appreciated by most potential buyers. (Of course, for us book nerds, it would have been the clincher!). In a family of tall people, I’m not sure that low ceilings are terribly practical, but I stayed at a friend’s house in London in August and her guest room in the loft conversion was perfect for my size. So it can be done!
A sort of game den and TV room – this is the type of conversion I saw a lot of when searching for houses to rent in France. This one is the States, I believe. From The Loft Room.
The height and beams of this one look very similar to my loft in the UK, and what a nice office it could have been. From Self-build.co.uk
Smaller nook but nicely combined with a balcony, from resi.com
Another clever use of small spaces and balconies, from Italy, from FAKRO
An escape room where you can listen to music and read in peace, from Edinburgh. John Webster Architecture.
For the truly aspirational in terms of height (and I suspect somewhat enhanced by AI or terrible beige taste). From Pinterest.
I’m continuing the theme of #ReadIndies and the Far East, with two more books from independent publishers and from my favourite part of the world. They couldn’t be more different in style and subject matter, but both are by women authors and deserving of your time.
Qiu Miaojin: Last Words from Montmartre, transl. Ari Larissa Heinrich, NYRB, 2014
This book is one long cry of anguish, a passionate outburst of love declarations but also rancour at the end of a love affair, an acknowledgement of one’s own mistakes but also full of wonder and resentment. A living, breathing contradiction, a love letter and a suicide note (or rather twenty of them, which the author claims can be read in any order). The breathless, feverish quality of this work reminded me of Rilke’s beautiful translation of Letters of a Portuguese Nun, which I read in my early teens. These 16th century love letters (now widely believed to be fictional) were incredibly influential on the epistolary novels that followed and on the Romantic movement.
Perhaps Qiu intended this to be fiction too, and she certainly plays around with different characters and points of view (the letters are not just written by one character nor addressed to just one character), but the fact that the author committed suicide shortly after finishing this novel (which was published posthumously) makes this impossible to read without bearing that in mind.
In the very comprehensive and helpful translator’s afterword, we find out more about Qiu Miaojin, who was considered a bit of a prodigy in Taiwanese literature and a cult figure in queer literature, with her early success Notes of a Crocodile, about life as a lesbian university student and a crocodile who has to hide his/her true nature from society. The author then went to Paris for further studies in clinical psychology and feminism – but also immersed herself in art, literature and films. So it’s not just Montmartre as a location that appears in this work, but also numerous references to French and other Western culture, to Angelopoulos and Tarkovsky, to Western philosophers, and also Japanese authors she revered like Mishima and Dazai Osamu.
I’ll leave you with a few quotes to give you an idea of the style. It is so anguished and painfully raw and honest (ugly with feelings of violence towards the other but also guilty self-flagellation) that I could only read one letter at a time. It was the kind of book that left me giving a huge sigh of relief that I survived it – but in a good way. I dread to think what impact it might have had on a more vulnerable teenage me. And yet there is something so universal and beautiful in the way she describes love and hurt – albeit toxic love. This would have been a better reinterpretation perhaps of Wuthering Heights…
I love her like this not because she is perfect or possesses certain qualities well-suited for me: in other people’s eyes she is possibly just an ordinary girl. I love her like this because my desire matured for her. Yes, this is a milestone in my life that can never be erased.
I suppose my words here are a final attempt to forgive Zu. If this fails, I can’t keep living in a body that hates her so intensely. I’ll have to die, as a final act of reconiciliation for being alive, a reconciliation of my deepest love and hate intertwined. And a reconciliation with her being alive. My death will remind her of the seriousness and sincerity of life itself. There will be nor more problem of forgiveness; a place will remain as the foundation of our love.
I hate my personality, hate that I’m too passionate and ‘active’; and I hate that I long for you and need you too much… I hate that my passion makes me sick and that it becomes so easy for me to injure myself, hate that I suffer so easily, hate that my excessive neediness causes you to worry causes you to suffocate causes you to feel oppressed…
Bora Chung: Your Utopia, transl. Anton Hur, Honford Star, 2024
Three choice of covers here: which do you prefer?
If you have read the previous collection of short stories by Bora Chung, the International Booker shortlisted Cursed Bunny, this collection is rather different: less wild surrealism and horror, instead more science fiction with real-life adjacent scenarios. What remains constant in her work, however, is her social critique and empathy for ‘the little people’ who toil away without much recompense to make a society wealthy and successful. Bora Chung is a committed activist in real life (and she writes about this in the afterword), and I did feel that occasionally the stories veer a little too much into blunt messaging territory. So overall I would say this story collection is less metaphorical and surprising than Cursed Bunny.
Some of the stories start off innocently enough, as if they were set in a world very similar to the one we know. The Center for Immortality Research sounds like any other office environment we know, with job title inflations, endless meetings, shuffling around of papers and changing corporate wording so many times that it loses all meaning. It’s a humorous piece about dysfunctional workplaces, except that it’s a Huis Clos scenario (hope I’m not giving too much away). A Very Ordinary Marriage starts off as a story about a husband who is suspicious about the phone calls his wife makes at odd times at night, but then turns out to be something considerably stranger than an extramarital affair. To Meet Her might be describing a typical fan meeting with a celebrity, albeit one who survived a terrorist attack a few years earlier.
The End of the Voyage appears more straightforwardly sci-fi (and is the one closest to horror, although there is nothing too gory in this book): set on a spaceship that is navigating somewhere far from Earth to try and find a solution or a cure or simply to outstay a deadly Disease that has attacked humans on Earth, turning them into cannibals. Maria, Gratia Plena is set in a hospital, but humans are now capable of scanning the memories of patients in a coma – and do so under the pretext that they might be able to uncover some criminal activities, while the professional scanner is disturbed and ultimately moved by what she sees in the woman’s past, whether real or imagined. Seed is a great little revenge story – or an ecological one, depending how you choose to look at it. But it’s the two stories narrated by machines – a car in Your Utopia and a lift in a residential building in A Song for Sleep – that struck me most. In our world today, when we are starting to fear and resent AI and robots, these stories try to demonstrate that sometimes the machines can develop more empathy than most humans.
Just listing the vague content of each story doesn’t give you a feel for things, obviously. Let me add that all this is done in a deceptively cool, detached tone (the polar opposite of Qiu’s impassioned one): the message and the style of delivery seem deliberately at odds with each other, and in this case it works perfectly. It’s a tricky style to pull off, particularly in translation: it can sound too impersonal or cold, or just plain flat, but I think Bora and Anton have created a formidable writer/translator combo. They really seem to ‘get’ each other and be able to play with the readers’ expectations, create something that seems light-hearted or plain at first glimpse, and then hits you with the full impact. Perhaps because Bora is a translator herself and because Anton also writes science-fiction tinged fiction, but it certainly works.
Well, this has NOT been a month of reading, whether performative or not. I don’t think I’ve ever read so little since starting my blog, and am two books behind on my Goodreads goal (which I thought was a relatively doable one, I usually go well over). I suppose it’s a combination of too many activities, including job hunting, but especially seeing so many Berlinale films, which really ate into my reading time. I might also add that a few of the books I was engaged with this month are real chunksters (Chevengur, the Murakami below and now The Remembered Soldier). However, I have got hold of a few of the books on the International Booker longlist, so I hope to speed up as I read those.
Just six books read, and only two of them reviewed – although I do intend to review two more. My one claim to fame is that they are all from indie publishers (even the bestseller type one by Daniel Glattauer is from Hanser Verlag in Munich, which doesn’t belong to any of the major groups), so fit into the #ReadIndies category.
I continued my pursuit of Japanese literature with From the Fatherland, with Love, which was infuriating at times but also really good fun and explosive as one might expect from Murakami Ryu. Metropole was intriguing and disquieting, a book that I couldn’t read very quickly. The Romanian book is a memoir by one of the best authors of roughly my parents’ generation. The Glattauer was disappointing. I will review Last Words in Montmartre this coming week – it was short but so powerful and depressing, a real cry of despair, that I couldn’t read more than one chapter a day. Finally, The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran is on the International Booker longlist AND is translated by Ruth Martin, who was our tutor on the translation summer school a couple of years ago and actually discussed some of the passages from this very book with us.
Other than not reading, I have of course been watching quite a few films; seven at the Berlinale, but others both in the cinema and at home. 14 films in total must be quite a record for me in a short month, that’s practically one every other day. The most memorable films were:
No Other Choice (although I don’t think it’s Park Chan-wook’s best, but it had the same frenetic movement and heavy-handed satire of Mickey 17 by his fellow Korean director Bong Joon-ho). I’ve noticed that with other films that came out this year, even the ones I liked (I will not mention Wuthering Heights, which I haven’t seen) like Bugonia or One Battle After Another, that subtlety no longer seems to be in fashion. The message is bludgeoned on your head.
On Our Own – which started out in a slightly annoying Gen Z shenanigans fashion, but then became much deeper and more moving
The Rose Come Back to Me documentary – a must-see for fans
We Are All Strangers – just a simple slice of life, if you like, from Singapore, but done with the subtlety that has been missing from others
Most disappointing? It pains me to say this, because these are both about themes that preoccupy me a lot and the main actresses gave a sterling performance, but Promising Young Woman and The Last Showgirl just didn’t have enough depth to set them apart. I’m also continuing my series of films set in Berlin and watched Nico, about a German-Iranian woman in her 30s who’s a devoted social carer, cheerful and happily integrated in her German life, until she is the victim of a racially-motivated attack. Again, a serious theme and with excellent acting, but resolved a little too simplistically. However, it was a good companion piece for The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran.
The longlist for the International Booker was announced yesterday and, although I am now finding it harder and more expensive to order English-language books, I will attempt to join the wonderful Shadow Panel once again and read my way through at least some of these. There is only one East Asian representative on the list – and the only book I’ve already read: Taiwan Travelogue.
The judges this year have clearly not shied away from established publishers and authors, as there are quite a few on the list who’ve been on either the longlist or the shortlist in previous years. I am slightly disappointed to see such a heavy European representation; other than Taiwan Travelogue, there are only two from South America, one from Iran and one written in German by an author of Iranian descent but born in Germany. None from Africa, unless you think that Marie Ndiaye fills that gap.
I was planning to read The Wax Child by Olga Ravn, The Deserters by Mathias Enard and Women Without Men by Sharnush Parsipur anyway, and I’ve added The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran by Shida Bazyar (translated by Ruth Martin, and a work that we discussed during our translation summer school a couple of years ago) and The Remembered Soldier by Anjet Daanje. I don’t know if I have the money or the will to attempt any of the others, although the Charco Press one looks interesting, as always.
These past two weeks I’ve attended several films at the Berlinale – well, you have to, when a major film festival is on your doorstep (pretty much all of the venues were less than 30 minutes away from my door by public transport). That is, if you can get hold of tickets, despite the often huge venues where the films are screened. For most of the films you can only book online three days beforehand, so there I was with my fingers poised to click at 10 a.m. every morning, but things would sell out in less than a minute, and I was only successful on three days. Worse than rock and pop concerts! It amuses me to hear that people take days off work or travel all the way from Spain to attend the full ten days, but it also warms the cockles of my heart to see that a documentary from Ethiopia or a film from Ghana shown at 11 am on a weekday (for example) were sold out. Then again, what else can you do on a miserable February day in Berlin?
Most of the films were sad, thought-provoking and political (with a capital or a small P), which made all the questions about politics that journalists kept asking jury members, actors and directors seem rather unnecessary. I can completely understand the anger about the hypocrisy and silence surrounding Gaza (particularly in Germany), but let the art speak for itself and stop expecting actors to make valuable contributions to political discourse (if they choose to do so, that’s fine, but most of them won’t have anything very valuable to add to those topics). However, I got to attend Q&As with the directors and some of the actors at three of the events (another bonus of the Berlinale) and the questions were all about the films and the characters, so that was quite nice.
I did not get to watch any of the major prize winners, but here is a list:
GOLDEN BEAR FOR BEST FILM Gelbe Briefe (Yellow Letters) by İlker Çatak (Turkish/French/German co-production) SILVER BEAR GRAND JURY PRIZE Kurtuluş (Salvation) by Emin Alper (Turkish) SILVER BEAR JURY PRIZE Queen at Sea by Lance Hammer (UK/US)
But here are the films that I did see and I thought all of them were quite good. Since most of these films are not out on general release yet, I’ll also make comparisons to other films that are similar in tone.
The Rose: Come Back to Me
Not strictly speaking part of the Berlinale, but released on 14th February as a love letter to the Black Roses (the name of the band’s fan base), this is a film about a K rock band who did not get on with the K pop trainee system and did things their own way, and managed to survive despite lack of promotion in South Korea, having to sue their management company, people trying to create distrust between the band members, military service, depression and a marijuana scandal. I discovered this band last year and attended their concert in London, so this was a great way to get to know them better, but also an inspirational story about the power of music and of being true to yourself. Comparisons: Sing Street, The Commitments.
Enjoy Your Stay – A Swiss-Filipino co-production, about Filipina cleaners working in a luxury Swiss resorts like Verbier. Some of them are abused, but all of them appear invisible to the wealthy people holidaying in the resort. The script follows the ‘found stories’ approach, so presents many real-life, but slightly fictionalised cases. The main protagonist Luz tries to help others but is faced with some tough choices and therefore cannot afford to be an angel herself. Strong ensemble cast and three-dimensional main characters, never entirely evil, just trying to survive in a ruthless global capitalist machine. Comparisons: A Better Life, Dirty Pretty Things, My Name Is Loh Kiwan, A Season in France, Eastern Boys.
De Capul Nostru (On Our Own) – Romanian film about teenagers whose parents have gone abroad for work and they are left to fend for themselves (sometimes with elderly, ineffectual grandparents in the background, or older siblings who are busy with their own lives). I did feel angry with the parents who kept promising to return home, but I also realised they genuinely thought they were working hard to offer a better life for their kids. A film that blends painful dialogue with teenage fun, deep social and personal problems with a dream-like atmosphere (and beautiful moments of a found-family dynamic). Filmed near where my parents live. Amazing acting and improv work by a very young cast in their first roles. Possibly my favourite film of the Berlinale. Reminded me of: Shoplifters, Kids, Happyend. This film did win a prize in one of the many categories: CICAE Art Cinema Award.
Videograms of a Revolution – documentary (based on footage created at the time) about the 1989 Romanian uprising. I knew this would bring back memories and it did: not so much the euphoria I felt at the time, as anger, sadness and shame at the chaos, confusion and power-grabbing going on behind the scenes. An amazing piece of history. Another plus of the Berlinale was that I got to explore various venues that are not normally cinemas, such as the German Cinematheque Museum, which is where this screening took place.
Wo Men Bu Shi Mo Sheng Ren – We Are All Strangers – the underbelly of Singapore’s wealthy society, via the story of a patchwork family. Scenes of everyday life, small joys but also painful dramas, all handled in a fairly matter-of-fact way, as part of life, with a great deal of humour as well as pathos. Particularly poignant juxtaposition of the older generation going on a date just travelling around on a city bus, while the younger generation frolic in the swimming pool of a luxury hotel. But both of them have to deal with the consequences, although I’d have liked to see more of the point of view of the young girl – I felt that was missing. Comparisons: Taipei Story, Comrades: Almost a Love Story.
Shibire (Numb) – a young Japanese director’s partly autobiographical story of a boy growing up in Niigata with neglectful and violent parents, who becomes mute as a result of this. There was a great deal of silence therefore in the film, as we watch the boy at four different stages in his life: from youngster dropping out of school to look after the household while his mother goes off to drink and spend time with men to drug-dealing yakuza. Hard to watch at times, but I rather liked the small details that get shown and the silence. The eyes do the talking. The profile shots of the boy at various life stages got a bit repetitive though and I’m not sure why the only character who attempts to befriend the boy, Ivan, had to be Russian. Comparisons: Moonlight, This Boy’s Life.
A New Dawn – animated film from Japan about three young people fighting a losing battle to turn back time and revive respect and admiration for old crafts such as fireworks. Fighting against inevitable development and ‘progress’ – their house will be demolished, the bay will be drained and built up with solar panels. They are fighting a losing battle but manage to create one last glorious display. Although the story tried too hard to be interesting in structure and bring in flashbacks, it left me with a sense of sadness that is probably exactly what the director intended (he was also art director on Your Name) and shows the abandonment and decay of rural communities (not just in Japan). Pretty pastel visuals and some hilarious stop-motion animation too. I left singing the catchy title song by Imase. Comparisons: Your Name, Princess Mononoke.
En Route To – a touching story of solidarity and friendship among teenage girls. After the disappearance of the married homeroom teacher she’d been having an affair with, Yunji buys illegal pills off the internet to induce an abortion. She ‘borrows’ the money from her roommate, Kyung-sun, who is furious initially but then decides to help her rather clueless classmate. Lots of subtext there, especially for South Korean society that does not really want to know about sex with minors or teenage pregnancies or abortions, but interspersed with lighter moments, especially from the wise-cracking Kyung-sun. A much more positive spin on this kind of story than my comparison film: 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days; Celine Sciamma’s Girlhood.
You knew this was coming, didn’t you? I’ve always been fascinated by writers’ homes and back when I lived in France/Switzerland, I visited a fair few in person. Here are some German writers’ homes which I have not visited yet but fully intend to.
Heinrich Heine’s parental home in Lüneburg, from luneburg.info
Erich Kästner’s house in Dresden, from gpsmycity.com
Goethe’s garden ‘hut’ in Weimar. He had a full-size house in the centre of town as well. From International Architecture Database.
Hans Fallada’s house in Carwitz, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. From FalladaMuseum.de
Closer to Berlin, the Brecht Weigele weekend home in Buckow, from ADAC site.
So after all these privileged male writers, shall we have a look at how a woman writer like Anna Seghers lived? Yep, in a small flat in the south-east of Berlin. From Berlin.de
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 Volumeby 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.
Photo from Femina.hu with the occasion of centenary of his birth
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.
I think my blog is being attacked by bots, because there is no way the traffic has ramped up so dramatically following a couple of book reviews and escapist pictures. But I will ignore all of that and keep going, as long as they don’t try to infect me or you readers with some kind of virus. For today, I was dreaming of escaping to places with better weather, or at least to places where there might be summer at present, with some beautiful buildings that have actually been properly designed by architects rather than cookie-cutter building.
John Marsh Davis house in California – love the doors that slide open and of course the bookcases. From Instagram.
Yes, I know this only works during a dry summer, but I could imagine some kind of sliding doors being used in winter. From Japandi
A modest ‘holiday cottage’ in the Austrian Alps, from Booking.com, with plenty of outdoor space for partying.
The boathouse on the Lingholm Estate in the UK is a dream – I wouldn’t need anything bigger than that. From TheLingholmEstate.co.uk
Kengo Kuma’s tea house and museum in the Japanese Gardens in Portland, Oregon
But I’ve saved the best for last, with this gem from Bay of Islands, New Zealand, designed by Pete Bossley, from homemagazine.nz
Built to hug the slope, this is what it looks like on the inside. From homemagazine.nz
findingtimetowrite 
