The Parasite by Ferenc Barnás
Hungarian fiction
Original title – Az élősködő
Translator – Paul Olchvary
Source – Personal copy
I started off the Hungarian lit month with this book; it caught my eye from the Seagull list of books from Hungary because it had a quote from Laszlo Krasznahorkai, ” Ferenc Barnás is a legend among those who know him,” now, when you get that from the most recent Nobel winner as a recommendation. Barnás seems to have won many of the major book prizes in his own country, and this was his debut novel, which came out in 1997 in Hungarian. I feel we get caught up in place-based trends when translating these days, and a powerhouse of literature like Hungary, with one of the strongest and most interesting literary scenes, is forgotten. Barnás has taught at times and, at other times, been a full-time writer. There are a couple of his other books out or due to be released by Seagull Books.
One of the men in the ward resembled a friend of mine who’d escaped from an occupational therapy clinic in the provinces. I always did like that ever-smiling wino. After absconding from that teetotalling institution, he took to hanging out at a train station, where his fellow imbibers would sometimes help him towards the public restroom to keep him from wetting his pants even more than he already had. One time I noticed him grinning knowingly at his half-witted chums, who, having been summoned to the train cars for a bit of hard labour to earn their bread or wine, were busily carrying dreadfully heavy sacks full of who-knows-what back and forth for some no doubt noble purpose. No, he wasn’t such a fool atter all. While the others toiled away, he went about not so discreetly sampling fruit brandy he’d acquired for a modest sum from someone’s illicit distillery.
His viewing other people in the hospital as a child
The narrator of this book is unknown. We follow him from late childhood to adulthood. He is a strange character; he thrives on illness and a sort of Munchausen youth, though his body suffers from this constant need to be ill. But he feels safe as a patient; you feel it is almost his safety blanket against the world, a strange boy feeding on symptoms. But as the world is, boys become men, and he grows up and starts to be a man, having relationships, he also starts masturbating greatly. At some point, you are not sure if the encounters he claims to have are real or maybe a fever dream, sexual imagery for him to come tooo? , but even then, he has quirks; he has one-night stands, but then he gets haunted and wracked with dreams of what the previous night’s women are now doing. But when he ends up with an older woman simply called L, but the initial silence of the dreams and nightmares that haunt his sex life ends, but then come back in a darker way.
Perhaps I should have placed an ad in the classifieds: ‘Seeking someone to beat sordidness of unknown origin out of me, every last bit of it. Perverts need not reply!’ Who knows, perhaps I would have happened upon a psychotic prison guard who specialized in exactly my sort of case! Why shouldn’t there be people out there who know not only torture inside-out but also psychology? | yearned for an applicant who could discern the nature of my imagination through my body’s agony. I would have been able to determine even from his mistakes whether he was really suited to the task. Even as I smiled at this childish escape fantasy of mine, I was virtually certain that people must have once lived who knew just how to go about exorcizing demons.
Seeking out people to suit his particular sexual needs
I loved this book. It had a little bit of Thomas Bernhard in it. The sheer sorrowful life of our narrator is very Bernhardian. But the voice comes across as very quirky at times, a tone and feel to the narrative I haven’t read in anything else, which makes it very interesting. But for me, Bartis, another Hungarian writer, his book Tranquillity is about a young man set in roughly the same time, although in many ways different; both are ways of looking at the child-parent relationship growing up in Socialist Hungary. Another feeling for me was that our narrator grew up, his one-night stands were either real or just fever dreams from his sexual mind, and guilt of being the way he was, and that is why initially his relationship with L is so different. This is what I love about much of the Hungarian fiction I have read: it is deep-thinking, and it requires readers to reflect on the characters. I will be in the historic Roman times in the next book for Hungarian lit month in a few days’ time. Have you read any books by Ferenc Barnás?
