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Hourglass

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If Franz Kafka's Joseph K. had lived in the early 1940's and been ordered to wear a yellow star in Czechoslovakia, he would have resembled a character known only as E. S. in this story of wartime Hungary by Danilo Kis. The trial of an individual and his family at the hands of a vague and hidden totalitarian force are described with growing horror and gallows humor in ''Hourglass,'' a chilling novel in which time is running out for a marked man riding along the tracks of mortification.

One of the trains he takes eventually must lead to a concentration camp. But the journal of the final months of his life is told with such authority in this imaginatively constructed story that the doomed character appears to be in command of his own destiny. ''Hourglass,'' translated from the Serbo-Croatian by Ralph Manheim, is evidently rooted in firsthand family experiences. The reader is informed that a letter attributed to E. S. in the novel is based on an actual letter written by Kis's father two years before his death in Auschwitz. But the universal elements in the story - the attempt to carry on the everyday routine of life and the disbelief in an official policy of genocide - offer a parable about the extermination of the Jews by the Third Reich and its collaborative governments in occupied Europe. Trains were essential for the Third Reich to fulfill the quotas for the Holocaust, and trains play an essential part in the novel. At one point, the narrator sees himself, with trembling hands, gathering up his papers in his seat in the first-class carriage and stuffing them into his briefcase along with bottled beer and smoked-herring sandwiches. The author then transforms an ordinary train ride into an act of terror: ''Who was standing beside him at that moment? A young blond conductor, who was aiming his nickel-plated ticket punch like a revolver at the star on his chest.''

The interrogation of the narrator is bizarre. It shows the police mentality at work in a police state anywhere. The narrator is questioned about a piano in his home. The line of questioning goes: Can the piano be used to send signals? Where in the room is the piano? Can you describe what it looks like? Why was an open score on the music stand? How do you account for the fact that the piano was open and that someone had been practicing so early in the morning? Inevitably, the answers to dumb questions sound somehow suspicious and lead to more questions.

The nameless E. S. wonders how he can avenge himself against the armed police. He indulges in a small act of defiance for his own self-respect: ''Several times he had blown his nose into a newspaper with the Fuhrer's picture on it. Was he conscious of the danger he was courting? Definitely. He always folded the paper as small as possible before throwing it into dense brambles or the river, thus doing away with the corpus delicti of his insane and dangerous act.'' There are deliberate breaks in style as the author shifts back and forth in chapters that are labeled ''Travel Scenes,'' ''Notes of a Madman,'' ''Criminal Investigation'' and ''A Witness Interrogated.'' The year 1942 is a crazy time in the Danube Valley for the first-person narrator. He is trying to maintain a semblance of sanity while composing a letter to his sister that forms the spine of the story. If there is a theme in the novel, it is summed up in the last sentence of that letter:

''P. S. It is better to be among the persecuted than among the persecutors.''

''Hourglass'' owes a debt to ''The Trial'' by Kafka. In the narrator's musings, Kafka is cited: ''Everything that is possible happens; only what happens is possible.'' What distinguishes Kis's novel is its authorial independence. A conventional narrative structure is ignored; it is the author's musings and diversions that magically build suspense. Some paragraphs run on for pages, others suddenly break into short questions and answers between the omnipotent state and its helpless victims. Kis forces the reader to work for him, to pay attention. That he succeeds is a rare achievement...

For those of you not yet acquainted with Danilo Kis's rare genius of bringing his reader into strange, undefinable dreamworlds, then The Hourglass is a great place to start.

Set in 1942 in the ethnically mixed Vajdaság region of Hungary, the story traces the gradual descent into madness of one E.S., railway clerk, who realizes that insanity is the only dignified refuge left in an ever-darkening world. The first part of the novel is a grotesque, rambling catalogue of E.S.'s acquaintances, friends and family who all meet horrid ends as the wheels of the Holocaust start to churn. E.S.'s world slowly slips into the abyss as the pogroms, persecutions and deprivations slowly evolve into a full scale death factory, serviced by the same railways that E.S. is convinced are the only refuge of sanity and international neutrality in a Europe turned upside down. The truly fiendish irony is that these mobile 'Switzerlands' as E.S. calls them are what made the Holocaust possible in the first place. Fast, accessible anywhere and keeping to time, they fed the hellish ovens with their human fuel.

In the rest of the novel, E.S. lucidly describes his 'work' duties in a slave labor battalion, where he and his group of comrades were forced to make bricks under bestial conditions. All the while, E.S. writes down his 'Diary of a Madman,' no doubt a reference to Gogol's masterpiece, where an unknown inquisitor (Kafka's Trial?) mercilessly interrogates E.S. about the minutiae of his simple existence. Struggling to give some sort of rational explanation to the whole chaos surrounding him, he falls deeper into the black hole of madness. As does anyone who tries to rationally understand the inane senseless of the Holocaust.

Yet, despite his impending destruction, E.S. maintains his humanity. How? By writing it all down. Making that 'bourgeois horror novel.' By creating something out of the void and thus giving us hope that we shall all earn some measure of eternity by what we leave behind.

The "catechetic rhetoric" of the question & answer exchanges throughout the Criminal Investigation segments make for never less than fascinating reading. They evoke not only Kafka but Joyce in his Ithaca chapter of Ulysses; the omniscient and patiently probing inquisitor, here, finally gets "ES" to admit his weariness, but the rare entry of the interrogated into the set-up only enhances its blended horror and suspense.

This ambitious novel, in its other modes of transmission, "Diary of a Madman," and Travel Scenes, intersperse with the Criminal Investigation sections. These, to me, recall many other Central European fictional post-war attempts to plumb the heart of mid-20c darkness. It is not to fault Kis for doing well what he does here, but these portions lack the excitement of the interrogative modes, and by comparison languish on the page in their comparative introspection and wandering reveries.

As a whole, the novel works best in Bloomsian asides, such as ES thinking about how to see the world through glasses that imitate the curvature of a dog's eyes, the weariness of fecundity, or the closing pages in which the Garden of Eden, the stages of man's life, the battle against nothingness so characteristic of Jewish secularised mentality, and the link to Kis' own forebears becomes clearly visible behind the novelistic scaffolding of the previous 250 pages, which read quickly for a subject so dense.

This is a difficult read which I tended to race as I neared the end. Which is not to say it does not have an aggregate of power awaiting the more patient and attentive reader. It raised questions in me, such as Why Literature? which I answered myself in my head as I read
(in the manner of parts of the book itself) as follows: because literature reminds us that no matter how horrible our individual circumstances there is ALWAYs someone worse off and it puts one's own miserable and petty life in perspective( see p. 77) It also has a bitter humour: when notified that her husband had heroically laid down his life for the first Hungarian Regiment of Hussars, the wife immediately consulted a fashion magazine and chose a black dress in the latest style (winter 1941-42) see P.67). He also provides information on how we can dedtermine why the world is doomed to destruction - look into our own hearts, (see p.129). Call it post-modern. Call it difficult. But do not call it an easy read.

Danilo Kis's Hourglass fulfills what the historian Hayden White described as the most proximate capture of the historical event of the Holocaust, the narrative art of literature. Kis recreates the life of a Hungarian Jew whose life is interrupted by his arrest and detention, but which has begun to unravel because of the limited trust that pervades what had been his normal milieu in a Hungary of assimilated Jews. The phenomenological rigor that opens and continues throughout the novel enables us to experience the disruption of reason that injures our own thought processes. Perhaps death is not the worst experience, rather a gradual loss of the normal imposed from without. At times, when a normal conversation with a friend is possible for an hour or so, it is as if one is given the richest gift of a lifetime, only to see it disappear as the day progresses. There is not in my experience a book or other account that so provides the 'lived experience' of Jews in this time.

Mark E. Blum, Professor of History, University of Louisville.

Kis's novel is one of the most important in the entire Eastern-european literature. It gives an incradible picture of a desintegrating mind, following, in a way the steps of Youce and Woolf, but still making a step towards postmodernism