Customer Reviews

Metropole

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Ferenc Karinthy (1921-1992), a trained linguist, was the son of famed Hungarian writer playwright Frigyes Karinthy. Not surprisingly, then, the complexity and confusion of language is the central theme of Karinthy's 1970 novel "Metropole" (originally entitled "Epépé"), the Kafkaesque tale of a hapless narrator stranded on the top floor of the figurative Tower of Babel.

The plot builds upon a basic but very ironic premise: Budai, a linguist, seems to have boarded the wrong plane on his way to a conference in Helsinki and has now ended up in a mysterious city in an unknown country with a singularly incomprehensible language. It is packed to overflowing: human congestion spills from the lobbies out into the streets and Budai is rudely rushed down sidewalks and through lines. Even the solitude of the hotel room he manages to acquire is afflicted by the alien alphabet he encounters in a framed printout presumably of hotel regulations. The overwhelming effect is one of claustrophobia reinforced by a rambling syntax that pushes headlong from page to page in lengthy paragraphs. A harried Budai roams from place to place in time with the narrative rhythm, attempting unsuccessfully to find . . . a way . . . out . . . OF . . . HERE! The very density of the urban dreamscape - its unyielding masses of humanity and mazes of streets, alleys, passageways, myriads of neighborhoods - seems to compress into a solid wall, entrapping Budai as effectively as any stone-and-mortar fortification. The mounting tension is palpable, even as it superficially plateaus when Budai settles into his hotel room, finds some work, and even acquires a sort of girlfriend. Obviously such fragile comfort cannot possibly last: it must prelude some catastrophe, which, when it comes, seems naturally inevitable as the expected fate of a stranger in a wholly strange land.

Yet strangely enough, however, Budai's demeanor throughout his ordeal is not one of panic or outright desperation; on the contrast, he is more perturbed than anything else. He is similar in that respect to many of Kafka's protagonists, particularly Gregor Samsa the giant bug, as an individual whose reaction to a grotesque or extraordinary situation is one of bemusement or annoyance rather than shock or terror. This lends a greater element of realism to "Metropole" that might have been otherwise submerged in emotional bombast. "Metropole" is frightening because it comes across as a probable scenario - not because it is a horror novel in the Stephen King or Dean Koontz sense of the term. In fact, it reminded me, oddly enough, of "Johnny Got His Gun," as a tale of a man locked in a nightmarish scenario and desperate make himself understood. What "Metropole" also does quite effectively is to unearth the subliminal fears of anonymity and invisibility in contemporary society. Indeed, it is a story of individuality and subjectivity taken to their greatest extreme: if each citizen of "Metropole" is actually uttering a verbal articulation of their own private language, as Budai comes to suspect, then maybe the driving force behind modern isolation is precisely this teeming urban obscurity, in addition to Western culture's emphasis on personal independence, personal ambition, personal expression, personal gratification, ad infinitum. If Budai is jarringly cool about his predicament, then perhaps that is because his situation is merely a farcical extension of the realities of modern life.

Despite its relatively unknown status in the United States, "Metropole" is actually considered a modern classic. Its unspecified setting and multilingual protagonist contribute to a greater international, cross-cultural appeal, especially as the nameless city is described as both a wanly generic and strikingly diverse place that any reader anywhere can envision for themselves. The bizarre nature of the story is itself an attraction, since one cannot help but wonder where all this could possibly lead to. "Metropole," therefore, comes highly recommended.

In a moment of distraction, a linguist named Budai slips through the wrong door at the terminal, and, after boarding his plane, settles in for a long nap during the flight. When he wakes, he is hustled onto a shuttle bus and taken to a hotel where he finds it is impossible to make himself understood or understand anyone, despite his familiarity with dozens of spoken languages. Soon it becomes apparent that he has not landed in Helsinki, his original destination, but instead in an unknown, and ultimately unknowable, land - thus begins Budai's lonely, frustrating trek through the maze of 'Metropole', Ferenc Karinthy's only translated work up this time.

Other reviewers - and my own dim memory - insist on comparing 'Metropole' to Franz Kafka's work, and in some ways, I think that, for once, it's an apt comparison. It's most apparent in the idea of the bewildered man trying to make sense out of a society that is alien to him (or he to it), with the critical keys of information that would allow him to operate within that society seeming to dangle just out of his, and the readers, reach. Other comparisons will depend on the reader's assessment of what exactly Kafka was about. Whereas I've always thought of his works as very personal reflections of his percieved incompatability with life, Karinthy's novel is more universal - an example of a common man and the connections to society that shape our identity, connections that are excrutiatingly obvious only once they are severed.

'Metropole' then follows Budai as he tries to make sense of his situation and return home. No attempt at communication is open to him though, whether through a language he recognizes nor through any try at rudimentary sign language. One of the characteristics of the city in which Budai is trapped is its crush of people - everywhere there are crowds, everywhere one must line up for the most basic service, and nowhere will anyone take the time to listen to Budai's strange jabbering. Even when he attempts to walk away from the city, it appears to continue on and on, with no interuption, suburbs connecting back into proper towns with no end in sight.

There is an old story-telling adage for plot development, which advises the author to put his characters in a tree, and then throw stones at them. The last part of the rule is to get them down, but Karinthy may not have been aware of it, since he continues to pelt Budai throughout the book, leaving only a small glimmer of hope near the end. And through it all, Budai degenerates as the time goes by, first be being turned out, for lack of money, from the hotel to which he was originally brought; to sleeping on the street and working as a day laborer in an open-air market. From there, it is too easy to spend his meager wages at the closest bar and let a creeping weariness take over.

This edition of 'Metropole' by Telegram Books has no introduction, and the biographical detail on Ferenc Karinthy is scarce - born in Budapest in 1921, the son of Frigyes Karinthy, author of over a dozen books, and a water polo champion. 'Metropole', first published as 'Epepe', was written in 1970, which surprised me - considering only the artwork on the front cover, I expected something from the twenties or thirties. Translated from the Hungarian by the poet George Szirtes (who also translated some of Sandor Marai's and Gyula Krudy's work), the prose of Karinthy is utilitarian, unlike the fanciful, simile-laden writing of Krudy - better, I think, to illustrate the deadening effect of the city as opposed to Krudy's rustic scenes. But it is not Karinthy's workmanlike writing (by no means inadequate) that is the reason to seek out or to skip 'Metropole'. Instead, the novel is more like a long fairy tale, or perhaps an account of a particularly vivid dream, which is an absorbing look at the relation between identity and society. It also comes bearing blurbs like 'masterpiece' and 'classic', which I think overshoot the mark, although I did enjoy it - more so even than Krudy, whom I also liked, but to be fair, these two Hungarian authors wrote at different times for a different audience. And truthfully, there is really nothing to associate 'Metropole' with Hungary at all. If anything, the closest it comes is in the industrialized and unfriendly atmosphere that, in my ignorance, I associate with Eastern Europe at that time. Not a classic, but interesting still. 4 1/2 stars, rounded up.

Metropole is a 2008 English translation of the Hungarian author's 1970 novel. The word "Kafkaesque" doesn't do justice to this novel. It is not "esque," it is more Kafkaesque than Kafka. What is it about Central Europe?

Metropole depicts a waking nightmare. A Hungarian linguist named Budai boards a plane to travel to a linguistics conference in Helskinki. He falls asleep in flight and wakes up when the passengers are deplaned in a strange city. Not Helsinki. The passengers are taken to a hotel where the protagonist, depite knowing ten languages, cannot make any sense of the spoken or written language. Nor can he find anyone who speaks any of the languages he does. They don't use Roman letters but luckily they use Arabic numerals. At the registration desk they take his passport, and they can't understand a word he says when he asks for it back. Budai is given a room and some local currency in exchange for what cash he has and the story begins.

The city is large and crowded with aggravated, unpleasant people. The people are of reconizably mixed racial types and wear recognizable clothing. The food is similar but all has a sickly sweet taste as do their alcoholic beverages. Budai can find no airports or any place that will have people speaking recognizable languages. There are churches but of no recognizable religion.

The hotel room gives Budai a comfortable base from which to explore and try to find a way out. What will happen when his money runs out? Will he ever make it back home? I won't spoil it for you.

Metropole is a well-written, readable yet highly disturbing allegory. The Cold War Eastern Bloc origins of the novel are obvious. But the fact that it disturbs us today speaks to something about the human condition that hasn't changed.

"Metropole" is a story of confusion written with absolute clarity. In brief the narrative tells of the Hungarian linguist Budai's unaccountable stranding in a strange city (he slept on the plane that brought him to his destination, and paid no attention on the bus ride to the center of the city, imagining that he was on course on the way to a professional conference in Helsinki; he soon gets a very rude awakening). Most critics would reach for the adjective "Kafkaesque" to characterize this story, but that's insufficient and does justice neither to Kafka nor to Karinthy. The city, apparently a densely built metropolitan capital, is strange in more ways than one. It is almost insanely crowded with people, requiring continuous queuing, elbow-jostling, pushing, and shoving at any and all routine locations and activities throughout the day. It's a multiracial society in which some members seem to wear color-coded workers' overalls to indicate their official functions or vocations, but, as with everything else in the city, Budai cannot work out the details or the meaning of what he's beholding. Strangest of all is its language, both as spoken and written. As a professional linguist Budai exhausts himself with systematic approaches to deciphering even the simplest, most often repeated phrases, but he never quite succeeds. Meanings seem to constantly shift as he approaches their decoding. He is overcome by the fear that he may be stranded here forever, though he never stops trying to breach the barriers that confront him. Strange as it is the city has features that are both familiar and always a bit "off" at the same time. There are stadiums with sports teams and fans, yet Budai can only guess at the nature of the game he witnesses. There are houses of worship and a priesthood, but, again, the purpose and object of their worship eludes him.

The novel's last third describes his downward arc in this society, in which, as weird as it is, he begins to make himself at home by means of sign-language and simple manual labor (he's been tossed out of his hotel after his money runs out). By the novel's end he has become a vagrant laborer, sleeping in alleyways, often hungry, usually dirty and unwashed, boilng over with rage and resentment. Nearing the end of the book he witnesses then participates in what he imagines to be a political revolution - a joyous, raucous parade turns into street demonstrations that turn into a riot in which both sides display virulent brutality and murderousness. And, yet, a few days after the carnage and damage to the city, everything has returned to normal and passersby go through their usual daily routines, apparently unaffected by the violent events in which most of them were involved. During the disturbances Budai begins to feel increasing sympathy for the citizens of this land that torments him with its opacity day in and day out. The "wave of revolution" and mob scenes may have been an inspiration for a similar sudden upwelling of irrational destruction in Krasznahorkai's "The Melancholy of Resistance." It's hard to imagine that the talented Krasznahorkai was not affected by Metropole.

Before his expulsion from the hotel, a place which annoyed and mystified him, but which in retrospect begins to look like a Paradise of comfort and regularity, Budai managed to make one solid human contact. This was with Epepe (a name he can never be sure of), a trim, blonde woman who operates an elevator in the hotel. At first he seeks her company for help in making himself understood, trying to break open the smallest crevice that will allow him to learn something of the local language. Eventually their contact turns into a night of passionate lovemaking, marred only by Budai's temporary loss of his senses when he inflicts a beating on Epepe, for which he truly repents and profusely apologizes - she has become the hapless target of his general rage and confusion, but his excesses advance his understanding no farther than his kindness. Epepe becomes another lost dream of human meaning and comfort after his ejection into the streets, and their contact is never re-established.

Given the claustrophobic, inescapable human density of the city, some readers might think of J. P. Sartre's witticism, "Hell is other people," for Budai finds himself in a kind of living hell, one not designed to inflict physical pain or punishment, but rather, from Budai's point of view, a place where confusion and anxiety can never find any relief. What is the story aiming for? The depiction of hell itself, or a hellish dream in the form of a waking nightmare? A fable of contemporary alienation, especially within Karinthy's home country of Hungary during its dreariest years of Communist Party rule? Or a blackly humorous allegory about man's position in the universe, which, in some ways must remain unknowable to him, and from which the only escape is death? Perhaps some or all of the above.

Readers familiar with older Hungarian literature in English translation might see a connection between Metropole and a chapter within the novel "Kornél Esti", written by Dezső Kosztolányi and published in 1933. I won't recount the story of the relevant chapter, but I will point out that it describes the bond of empathy that can develop between two people even when their languages are reciprocally unintelligible to each other. "Metropole" came out as "Epepe" in Hungarian in 1970 and was skillfully translated by the noted British poet George Szirtes (who was born in Hungary) in 2008 and reprinted in 2010. It's not the first of Karinthy's works to come over into English -- there is an internet listing for relatively rare copies of a 1964 translation of another of his novels -- but it is the only readily available one, and it should give the reader an appetite for more, which one hopes, will be satisfied by publishers in the not too distant future.

Any number of modern, nightmarish novels are given the epithet of 'Kafkaesque', but most contemporary writers pale in comparison to the truly disturbing, oppressive, claustrophic and dark fiction of Kafka himself.

Well, in the modern Hungarian, Ferenc Karinthy (himself the son of a famous Hungarian satirist/novelist/journalist) and his novel, Metropole, you find a truly worthy successor to Kafka, not only for his most famous work, The Trial (Dover Thrift Editions) but also - for its equally claustrophic, trapped sense of nightmare without end, his most famous short story - The Metamorphosis.

The plot itself is - as with Kafka's stories - straightforward; but it's in the novel's machinations, the relentless trial and tribulations of his character - here, Budai, a multi-lingual linguist - comparable to Joseph K.'s in The Trial, that you find yourself as a reader drawn in and ever downwards; conjoined with Budai's viewpoint on his world of suffering, alienation and incomprehension at arriving in a country and city that is massively, suffocatingly overpopulated and whose language he doesn't recognise whatsoever.

It is an astonishing work of fiction, with a translation that is seamless. The only complaint is that there are numerous errors in the copy-editing, which as all readers know can jar and upset the suspension of disbelief necessary to remain fully immersed in the fiction reading process itself. Highly recommended; I've no doubt Kafka himself would have been envious of this wonderful novel.

If you are a fan of Franz Kafka, you'll love this book. An absent minded man on his way to a conferenc gets on the wrong flight and finds himself in a surrealistic city from which there is no escape. Intense, fast paced and thought provoking.