"Life is impossible"

Zundel's Exit by Markus Werner

"It is in the literature of small countries that one learns that life is impossible."  Michael Hofmann

What an intriguing notion.  How counter-intuitive. I would have said that life is impossible in large countries, in the United States for example, or Brazil, or, heaven knows, in Russia, and that I would move to a cozy nation like Switzerland or Ireland or Portugal tomorrow if only I were able to do so. But Markus Werner's translator, the distinguished German scholar Michael Hofmann, thinks otherwise.  Life is impossible--in Switzerland?  I spent a happy month in Geneva, Bern, Interlaken, and Hunibach many years ago; "impossible" didn't come up.  I wasn't bored with Swiss politeness and civility, with the crystal-clear lakes or mountain vistas, and I wasn't appalled by the homogeneity of the people, many of whom spoke four languages and all of whom treated me like a distinguished guest (I would guess things are different now, post War-on-Terror).  The family who took me in, who drove me around the country, gave me the keys to their mountain chalet and car without knowing a thing about me--how could I have guessed at their true feelings?  What did I know of this small, peaceful nation's ennui?  Max Frisch, Robert Walser, Paul Nizon, and Peter Stamm are the only Swiss writers I've read, and none of them exudes the sort of cold, bright airiness that one associates with Bern or Geneva or glorious Interlaken. Perhaps it is the comfort of Swiss bourgeois life that is soul-crushing, or the relentless sublimity of the Alps, or the wealth, or the accuracy of the time-pieces.  In any any case, Zundel's Exit is a cheerless book, funny-sad in parts, but mostly mad and quirky and reflective of the sort of impossible life Hofmann cites in his introduction. 

There's a little of Aspen in Interlaken, but, having been to both the petit bourgeoise resort in Colorado and the haute bourgeoise resort in Switzerland, there can be no comparison.  No, life is far more impossible in large countries than small.  But then consider the sad case of the gymnasium teacher Konrad Zundel, who believes his wife to have been unfaithful, who has a morbid fascination with Italy (in just the way Thomas Mann obsessed over the malarial canals and back streets, the prostitutes and hustlers of Venice, so does Konrad spend much of the novel slumming in Genoa), and who pushes himself with breathtaking rapidity (the novel is a mere 124 pages) into madness.

Though Zundel's breakdown feels underdetermined--could he really believe his wife is unfaithful on the basis of a slanderous comment by his landlord?--he takes the path of many contemporary European malcontents, from Bernhard to to Frisch:

"I want my feeling raw, not spoon-sized, I want action, not the book, I hereby declare--until further notice--that unfiltered reality is my aim, and I mean it.  The mind--and I say it with all respect, and I have proof--the mind chokes off pleasure in living.  The fact that the female praying mantis (mantis religiosa) bites the head off the male at the onset of copulation and thereby heightens his sexual prowess (the head contains inhibitor nerve centers) can surely come as no surprise. The spontaneous life is--headless."

It's thinking that undoes us--we need to take on the world in all of its raw, unmediated terror to be sane.  I ask myself, "What sense does this make?"  I have little patience, at least in my literary life, with those who push themselves into madness in the name of enhanced experience. This deliberate flirtation with craziness is among the most unattractive legacies of romanticism, this equating of madness with insight.  Last year, rereading Celine's Journey to the End of Night I was close to thowing the book against the wall in frustration.  I feel the same way about the Beats (except William Burroughs, who was at least funny); the whole Rimbaudian "systematic derangement of the senses" leaves me cold.  Then again, one can see a kinship between Rimbaud and Zundel, for in both cases it is "Woman" (Rimbaud's scare-caps) who must be overthrown.  Zundel's wife Magda has many annoying habits, mostly having to do with her shallow feminism and the way she drops her hair clips carelessly about the flat--and this is more than Konrad can take.  When his malacious landlord suggests that Magda has been hosting gentlemen callers while Zundel was lurking in Italian train stations, Konrad Z. falls off the deep end, or rather, he falls into what passes for his own depths, which are, unlike Rimbaud's, not so much frightening as incoherent.  Zundel enjoys falling down, peeping through keyholes, sponteneously travelling to foreign places, and writing down his fragmentary thoughts. 

Rimbaud, who gave up literature at nineteen, wrote, in "Sensation":

"Je ne parlerai pas, je ne penserai rein:
Mais l'amour infini me montera dans l'ame, 
Et j'irai loin, bien loin, comme un bohemien, 
Par la nature--heureux comme avec une femme."
["I won't speak, I will have no thoughts:
But infinite love will grow in my soul,
And I will go far, far off like a bohemien--a gypsy,
Through nature--as joyous as a woman."]

And these sentiments come close to describing much of the story of Zundel's Exit.  A chaotic wandering through Genoa in search of something (a gun, a prostitute, the owner of a missing finger, a bit of lost dignity)--and then a breakdown.  I didn't much care if Zundel's woes were real or imagined, but I persist in thinking that perhaps he should have taken Magda on vacation in lovely Interlaken, eaten a bit of Swiss cuisine, gone for a hike, enjoyed a bit of carnality, and sought to discover if life, in the shadow of the Jungfrau, might not be possible after all.  I didn't dislike this book, but I found it, well, a little bit impossible.

Zundel's Exit, translated by Michael Hofmann, is published by the Dalkey Archive, which also publishes other Swiss writers like Paul Nizon and Gerhard Meier. 


George Ovitt (1/10/14)

Gaddis, Abad, Knausgaard, and Others

The Recognitions, by William Gaddis

Recipes for Sad Women, by Hector Abad

My Struggle, Parts I and II by Karl Ove Knausgaard

Zane Grey, and others

I've hit the more-than-half-way point in William Gaddis's The Recognitions--I was encouraged to push on after sailing (minus a week of the doldrums mid-passage) through Carpenter's Gothic in just a few weeks.  Honestly, once you get acquainted with a handful of Gaddis quirks--like figuring out who is speaking and separating dialogue from third-person narrative--he mixes the two in his idiosyncratic paragraphs--reading Bill Gaddis becomes much easier.  I've been assisted in my comprehension of The Recognitions thanks to Steven Moore's "Gaddis Annotations"--on-line, free, and a very helpful labor of love.  I have mixed feelings about needing comprehensive annotations when I'm reading a book, but I have to admit that I understood almost nothing of Ulysses until I read it with Don Gifford's Ulysses Annotated on my desk.  [e.g. "Boss Coker--Richard Coker (1843-1922)....12:196"].  If you decide to try The Recognitions--and I suggest you do--use Moore or else the Catholic Encyclopedia on-line--the first hundred pages are full of arcane reference to Catholic theology, martyology, and Spanish iconography.  I have (felix culpa) some passing familiarity with this material, but still needed annotations to make it through the first two chapters.  I also recommend a good volume of art history, (Janson will do), an encyclopedia (Gaddis used the famous Britannica, 12th ed. for much of his remarkable erudition), and of course the OED.  Reading Gaddis also has the advantage of making William Gass and Thomas Pynchon seem like walks in the park, and he opens up many of the secrets of the writings of David Markson (pictured below with Gaddis).  What is The Recognitions about?  Jacket copy mentions forgeries (in art and life), and I accept that, but on a deeper level I think Gaddis was after something more profound--I think he was debunking Western civilization, not any one part of it, but the entire history, structure, and all of the so-called rational aspirations of the thing--from the moment Socrates heard about his wisdom from the Oracle of Delphi to the commencement of the Cold War.  The whole thing, in Gaddis's view, was a sham.  And who could argue with him? David Foster Wallace, fond of footnotes, wrote a great novel, Infinite Jest, that was itself a footnote to Gaddis.

One of my pleasant discoveries of this past year was Hector Abad, whose memoir Oblivion I wrote about in the spring.  His slender book Recipes for Sad Women cheered me over the holidays, full as it is of easy irony and graceful wit.  The conceit of Recipes is simple: sad women need medicinal relief that can be supplied through the application of sympathetic magic.  Here's an example:

"You believe you loved him once upon a time. To put it a better way, you loved him.  But now, just thinking of him gives you shivers, disgust.  It was like loving a warrior in armour from which emerges, all of a sudden, the weak, slimy jelly of an abominable being....A sorceress of the high plains, a haughty bookish sorceress once gave me the recipe for dissolving the unpleasant memory of a bad past love affair.  To cancel that ignominious memory, it would seem, requires a return to savage rituals...You must acquire a slug, a snail without a shell...Place the slug on top of a pastel-coloured lined handkerchief and take a generous handful of finely ground salt, Throw the salt and watch how it begins to writhe and while squirming to dissolve into nothing. Don't watch anymore, tie the handkerchief closed and bury it twenty centimeters underground. With the slug dissolved in salt that disgusting memory will also fade." 

 Recipes for Sad Women can be read in a couple of hours--it's delightful and rich with deeper meanings about the losses that love brings and how, in the end, there is no way to cope with heartbreak, except, perhaps, by reading good books.

Speaking of sad women, that's Linda Knausgaard, long-suffering wife of Karl Uve, he of My Struggle, whose first two volumes I have just now finished reading, with considerable astonishment at my perseverance.  His ex-wife Tonje, and his current wife, Linda, come in for some brutal treatment at his hands--their physical attributes, their moods, and Linda's mental illness are all part of Karl Uve's story.  As a narcissist, he reduces the lives of other people to the forms of his perceptions; his empathy appears to be limited to himself and to his own tumultuous life.  At one point, when he is in love with Linda and she is not, it seems, in love with him, he cuts his face to ribbons with a piece of broken glass.  His "best" friend Geir (a real person, as is everyone in the two volumes) is used by Karl Uve as an informal confidant, drinking buddy, and perpetual ego-booster but never, it appears, as a friend (we hear nothing of Geir's life).  Karl Uve, let's face it, is not an attractive figure; he'd have done well as a character on "Friends"--he might be the brooding, self-flagellating nutcase from some obscure north European country, say, Norway, who shows up in the coffee shop, smoking hand-rolled cigarettes and scowling at Jennifer Aniston.  And yet, dammit: there's something compelling about these books; there's quires of dullness to be sure, and a kind of madness that couldn't be further from the arcane richness of Gaddis or the relentless sanity of Abad, but when he's writing well--on the effect that poetry has on a person for example--Knausgaard is very good.  I'm not sure what I'll do in May when volume three is published; probably I will read it, just as I've watched nearly all of "Breaking Bad" despite my reservations. 

 I've just dipped into the third volume of Reiner Stach's Kafka: The Years of Insight, which is must reading for any Kafka-lover (and who isn't that?), and I want to commit to the other volumes (II is out; I is in the works) as well as promise myself that this year I will finish Joseph Frank's monumental Dostoyevsky.  And I also wanted to make a top-five list of non-fiction works that I read this past year, books that are worth a devoted fiction reader's attention: 

1)  James Oakes, Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861-1865.  Forget "My Twelve Years as a Slave." Read this great work of scholarship instead.

2) Kevin Jackson, Constellations of Genius: 1922, Modernism, Year One.  Worst book title ever, and a dubious thesis--modernism actually began in 1900 with Freud's Interpretation of Dreams--but a provocative book, full of fascinating anecdotes.  A little like Markson, with its brisk staccato of cultural histories.

3) Sheldon S. Wolin, Democracy, Inc. The sequel to Alexis De Tocqueville's hopeful classic. The story of the destruction of American democracy.

4) Timothy Mitchell, Rule of the Experts. The history of neo-liberalism in Egypt.

5) Manning Marable, Malcolm X. I should have read this when it first came out. Not just a biography of Malcolm, but of the American underclass. 

As I get older I ask myself--will I ever finish Middlemarch? (No) Shall I read (one final time) The Brothers Karamazov? (Probably not).  How about Peter Nada's Parallel Stories? (I'll check with my doctor). And, will I ever read all of Balzac, Zola, Trollope, or Zane Grey? (no, no, no, and why not)?

Happy New Year!

Here's the Steven Moore annotations for Gaddis.

http://www.williamgaddis.org/recognitions/preface.shtml

Gaddis is found in the Dalkey Archive.  Abad in a lovely little Pushkin Press edition.  Knausgaard in Vintage (England) and Zane Grey in many places and formats. Start with Riders of the Purple Sage.

George Ovitt, (1/3/14)

The Eye of Ra

God Dies By The Nile by Nawal el-Saadawi

Danger has been a part of my life ever since I picked up a pen and wrote. Nothing is more perilous than truth in a world that lies.

“Nawal el-Saadawi,” writes Katherine Roth, in a piece for the on-line journal, The Best of Habibi, “is perhaps the best loved, most hated, and best known feminist in the Arab world.” Indeed El-Saadawi is like a latter-day Eye of Ra in the might and violence with which she (and this novel’s protagonist) confronts and subdues her enemies—those bloated, hypocritical, essentially male defilers of ordinary people and their homes who continue, Quran in hand, to define the fate of Egyptian girls and women to this day.

An ardent political and social activist, as well as an accomplished physician who has devoted much of her career to serving the rural poor, El-Saadawi is also a writer—an intellectual and artist who has committed much of her power to writing fiction as a means of speaking her mind. For it is through her novels, in their unflinching portrayal of the oppressed and often wretched lives of ordinary Egyptians, that she truly makes her mark, an authority perhaps nowhere more apparent, nowhere more affecting, than in her still-startling 1974 novel, God Dies by the Nile.     

Set in the fictional Nile village of Kafr El Teen, sometime in the long and unstable period between Egyptian independence from British control (1922) and the 1952 Revolution, led by the Free Officers Movement of Gamal Abdel Nasser (though distinctly the story has the timelessness of allegory, of myth) this provocatively titled novel tells the simple, if bracing tale of a widowed peasant woman, Zakeya, and her helpless struggle to protect her beautiful young nieces from the ruthless predation of the local mayor. The world of Zakeya is a grim, fatalistic world in which the rich and pious exploit the poor, and the men (be they rich or poor) exploit the women and girls—and all in the name of Allah, of God. 

In fact the lives of the women in this tale are all but entirely circumscribed by the whims and pleasures of men whose misogyny thrives in direct proportion to their piety and power. While there is no doubt that the routine tyranny, harassment, mutilation, and rape suffered by the women and girls in this story are an Egyptian, Muslim problem, a religio-cultural oppression decried again and again (and often smugly) in the popular Western press, it would be a shallow reading of this novel indeed if one were to close the book and not think long and hard about the different, if still pernicious effects of patriarchy and poverty here in the U.S. 

For the wonder of a novel like God Dies by the Nile lies not simply in its ability to show us the lives of others (that alone would be voyeurism, tourism), but also in its power to move us—men and women alike—to consider with fresh eyes the very terms by which we live and relate to each other, to examine daily all we hold “righteous” and “natural” and “true.” Grim as it is, this novel is much more than a catalogue of cruelties, for great fiction is always—indeed necessarily—redemptive. For a writer, a feminist, like El-Saadawi, merely describing the status quo could never be enough.

Nawal el-Saadawi, like her protagonist, Zakeya, was born on the banks of the Nile. As a young woman she refused to accept the limitations that both religious and colonial oppression imposed on most rural women, qualifying as a doctor, only to be awarded the post of Director of Public health before she was dismissed for writing Woman and Sex. Undeterred by this experience, the banning of her books, and even a period in detention under Sadat, she continues to write about Arab women’s problems and their struggles for liberation. (Thanks in part to Zed Books Ltd.) God Does by the Nile was translated from the Arabic by Sherif Hetata.

Peter Adam Nash

Love and Genocide

A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali, by Gil Courtemanche

 

"Redonner leur dignité a vos morts est un imperatif pour tout être humain."

"We can all turn into killers, Valcourt had often maintained, even the most peaceful and generous of us. All it takes is a certain circumstance, something that clicks, a failing, a patient conditioning, rage, disappointment.  The prehistoric predator and the primitive warrior are still alive beneath the successive varnishings that civilization has applied to mankind.  All the Good and Evil of humanity is in our genes. Either one can emerge at any moment, as abruptly as a tornado can appear and destroy everything where minutes before only soft, warm breezes blew."

A few days ago I read a story in the Times about yet another drone strike by the U.S. in a remote area of Yemen that killed at least five members of a wedding party whose members had the misfortune to be alive in a part of the world subject to our capricious military power.  Of course no one in the Obama administration spoke about the incident--just another example of "collateral damage" in the interminable "war on terror."  It was time for the President to go on vacation in Hawaii, and, you know how it is, Yemen is awfully far away.  Such stories should tear us apart, but I suppose they no longer can; we've grown inured to the carnage, and there are more important things for us to worry about.

I hadn't meant to write over the holidays about Gil Courtemanche's remarkable novel of the Rwandan genocide--I finished the book weeks ago and its effect on me was so devastating that I thought I might not speak a word about it.  But we must "restore the dignity of the dead" somehow, especially at this time of year when, in many religious traditions, and in isolated pockets of imperial America, we celebrate the imperatives of hope, the continuation of life in the season of darkness.

A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali tells the tragic story of the love of Bernard Valcourt, a journalist, and Gentille, a beautiful Hutu whose misfortune it is to be mistaken for a Tutsi in a divided and impoverished country obsessed to the point of madness with racial and cultural differences. The 'pool' at the Mille-Collines Hotel is the watering hole and epicenter of ex-pat life in the Rwandan capital in 1994 at the commencement of the genocide that killed between 500,000 and one million Tutsis and "traitorous Hutus," to use the language of the Akazu-Hutu leaders of the nation and their murderous partners in the principal Hutu militias.  This act of mass murder, witnessed at a safe distance and without protest over the course of four months by almost all Western nations (Canada and the Netherlands being honorable exceptions), pledged as they were to "non-involvement" in the internal affairs of UN member states*, was far more disorganized, bloodthirsty, and on a much greater scale than the contemporaneous massacres of Bosnian Muslims by Serbian military groups.  Hutu mobs and loosely organized militias hacked men, women, and children to death; burned them alive as they sought asylum in Catholic and Protestant churches, blew them up with hand grenades, and raped and mutilated tens of thousands of Tutsi women, deliberately infecting them with AIDS, epidemic in Rwanda at the time.

Gil Courtemanche was a journalist (he died in 2011), and much of A Sunday feels like the best of Graham Greene, absent the Catholic moralizing.  Courtemanche's narrator (and, one suspects, alter ego) Bernard Valcourt tells the story of his love for Gentille in an extended flashback, and because theirs is a tragic story, the tone of the novel is mordant, world-weary and roiled by the sense of a sane man's despair in the face of madness.  Like Greene's various persona, Valcourt casts a cold eye on his fellow ex-pats, men (mostly) who delight in the cheap liquor and cheaper whores of Kigali, who have no interest in the country's well-being, no respect for the Rwandans whom they order about with the kind of hauteur Europeans typically adopt in colonized nations--men with little or no curiosity about the violence unfolding around them.  They are burnt-out cases, Scoby's or Fowler's whose cynicism allows them to focus on their own futility and the pointless anhedonia of their lives. Alone of all the boozers and misanthropes who gather around the pool, Valcourt has the redeeming quality of being capable of feeling love.  Unlike the men--Europeans and Africans--who devour Gentille with their eyes and who paw her as she delivers their drinks (she works as a barmaid), Valcourt falls in love with a woman who is innocent yet experienced, capable of deep feelings yet jaded by the attentions her beauty brings.  We sense from the second she appears that she is doomed; innocence and beauty are not to be borne by the lovers of death. The motives that lie behind Courtemanche's love story are complex: Valcourt is a lonely man, an alcoholic, and there is little doubt that his love for Gentille represents his last opportunity for redemption; and Gentille yearns to leave Rwanda for a "civilized" nation. Yes, much like Greene--this is a romance set among the corpses.

I might as well say that the last fifty pages of this novel are almost unbearable--that is, the horrors they describe are almost more than I could stand. The writing is brilliant--understated, uncomfortably vivid, evocative of unremitting menace and inevitable violence. There were pages I skimmed or skipped, allowing my imagination to supply details that I couldn't face.  Of man's inhumanity to man too much has been said--Richard Rubinstein's brilliant essay The Cunning of History and Samantha Powers "A Problem from Hell" supply analysis of the genocidal "mentality," but at some point only fiction, or silence, or, as here, a picture can allow us to grasp the meaning of "inhumanity."  This young woman--her name was Uwamwezi Edith, was one of the victims.  I selected her picture at random from the Genocide Archive Rwanda (there are many more).

Even at this joyous time of year, in the crisp cold air of the high desert, with every comfort at hand, with the voices of my children in the background, with my family and friends in good health, I don't want to forget Uwamwezi Edith in her lovely blue dress, smiling into the camera.



For the Rwandan Genocide Site see http://genocidearchiverwanda.org.rw/index.php?title=Image:Kgmc_photo_00141.jpg

 A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali, trans. by Patricia Claxton, is available from Knopf and Vintage.   There exists a film of the novel, produced in Canada and directed by Robert Favreau, but I have not seen it.

*Ironically--?--the UN can only intervene in cases of genocide, but who's to say how many dead constitute "the murder of a people"?  Academics in the human rights business still debate this question.  But see Romeo A. Dallaire's Shake Hands With the Devil.  Dellaire was the Force Commander of the UN Peacekeeping force in Rwanda during the genocide and an advocate of Western involvement to end the killing.

George Ovitt (12/26/13)

The Persistence of Suffering

The Case Worker by George Konrad

let all those who want to; one of us will talk, the other will listen; at least we shall be together.

“If there is meaning in life at all,” writes neurologist, psychologist, and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl in his landmark study, Man’s Search for Meaning, “then there must be meaning in suffering.” By this he is not suggesting that one’s suffering serves a  higher purpose, that it is part of some divine or even biological plan, only that in its recalcitrance, its sheer ubiquity, it has the potential to teach us things—things about each other, things about ourselves.

The Case Worker—the first of five fine novels by Konrad to be translated into English—is a strange and strangely moving tale. Set in Soviet-controlled Hungary in the early 1970’s, in a Budapest so grim, so beleaguered, it bears little resemblance to the charming, spa city of postcards and films, the story follows the life and musings of an ordinary social worker, “an underpaid, disabused, middle-level official,” “a burden bearer without illusions,” “a professional child-snatcher,” whose charge is to sell indifference and normalcy, and to protect the interests of the state, a job he performs diligently, if with a mounting sense of impotence, despair:

Go on, I say to my client. Out of habit, because I can guess what he’s going to say, and doubt his truthfulness. He complains some more, justifies himself, puts the blame on others. From time to time he bursts into tears. Half of what he says is beside the point; he reels off platitudes, he unburdens himself. He thinks his situation is desperate; seems perfectly normal to me. He swears his cross is too heavy; seems quite bearable to me. He hints at suicide; I let it pass. He thinks I can save him; I can’t tell him how wrong he is.

Like Dante in the Inferno, the bewildered narrator of this story finds himself falling into a “deep place” (basso loco) where the sun itself is silent, a “gray-brown realm of unrelieved weariness,” a drab, phantasmagoric world crowded with every variety of misfit and tortured soul whose “anguish [is] massive, tentacular, and incurable”. The Budapest of this novel is a special ring of hell in which the damned suffer daily a state of perpetual siege without even the consolation of knowing that their pain matters—somehow, to someone, that it serves the lot of humankind, that, finally, it is homiletic, the handiwork of some remote and sagacious god.   

At one point the eponymous case worker recalls a story he’d heard about a disenchanted rabbi (a tale closely  reminiscent of that of the Buddha’s enlightenment as a young and naïve prince) who, weary of threatening his congregants with the wrath of “Yahweh Ineffable” deserts his synagogue and ventures out into the world to discover it anew. There he finds an old woman dying in her filthy hovel who implores him, “Why was I born when as long as I can remember nothing but misfortune has been my lot?” To which the helpless rabbi replies, “That you should bear it.” Drawing the sheet over her face, he decides from then on to be mute. The next person he encounters is a young beggar girl carrying her dead child on her back. When in reference to her baby, she asks the rabbi, “The poor thing got nothing, neither pleasure nor pain. Do you think it was worth his being born?”—a question to which the helpless rabbi nods his head. Thereupon he decides to be deaf as well as dumb and hide away from the world in a cave. There he finds a ferret with an injured foot, which he heals with bandages and special herbs. Soon the two grow fond of each other. Then one day a condor swoops out of the sky and carries off the ferret before the rabbi’s eyes, so that he decides to close them for good. Yet—since blind, deaf, and dumb—he can do nothing but wait for death, he returns to his congregation, where he “did what he had done before, and waxed strong in his shame.”

The protagonist of The Case Worker, a man all but overwhelmed by the futility of his work, and by the boundlessness of human suffering, is on the verge of following the rabbi’s example when he is trapped, shackled to this world and its pain by the life of a hideously misshapen, nearly feral orphan named Feri. At last, again, I turn to Frankl: “A man who becomes conscious of the responsibility he bears toward a human being who affectionately waits for him, or to an unfinished work, will never be able to throw away his life. He knows the ‘why’ for his existence, and will be able to bear almost any ‘how’.”

György Konrád (1933- ) is an Hungarian-Jewish writer whose first novel, The Case Worker (1969) was based on his experiences as a children’s social worker for the state.  In this and other writings he treats the social and spiritual problems of Eastern European life under fascism and communism, as well after the collapse of Soviet control. Among his other and highly recommended works of fiction are The City Builder (19175), The Loser (1980), A Feast in the Garden (1989), and Stonedial (1998). (Thanks in part to The Columbia Encyclopedia) 

Peter Adam Nash