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The Confessions of Joseph Baisz

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Have you ever carried a book around from place to place and neglected to read it? My first edition copy of THE CONFESSIONS OF JOSEPH BAISZ has been such a companion since 1978 but having started it a night ago, read it through in two sittings. If it is the case that trust is the only way in which a society can function, then Joseph Baisz the character is a pre-eminent example of an individual who can, like a cancer destroys a body, destroy society. And if it is the case that Stalin and Hitler, for example, could only have arisen because too many persons sought individual advancement through betraying their relatives, their friends, their neighbours, then the novel CONFESSIONS OF JOSEPH BAISZ is a fascinating case study of the mind of one of those individuals. And it is those little betrayals that can lead to the big ones. Although the parallels with other evil characters are alluded to such as RICHARD 111 and his ability to kill a man then woo and win his wife and relish doing it, Joseph Baisz is more akin to the murderers engage by RICHARD 111 to kill Gloucester - except that Joseph too gets pleasures from his many victories Like RICHARD but is unable to let go relationships with his victims.
Set in a totalitarian state there are no McDonald's arches visible in this novel and the landscape matches the mind of Joseph, an ordinary mind, but one that has a greater desire for Schadenfreude than most. The tone is comic, black but comic, where treachery can lead to love (p.70) where kidnapping children is the end result of fostering their trust (p.117) where the exquisite denoument is to betray one's closest kin, one's sister, whilst ON PARADE. The novel also contains one of the most potent paragraphs I've read about the nature of a gun - "....its ever open mouth, rounded in an expression of imbecile willingness. Overhanging the butt, like the back of a tiny cranium, was the curve of metal that contained the firing mec hanism: the only brain it had, capable of performing just one trick." p. 158 A measure or extension of the nature of those who use the things the author seems to suggest. In all, an apparently neglected novel well worth reading.