Day In Day Out

Day In Day Out was Terézia Mora’s debut novel, and it won the prestigious Leipzig Book Fair Prize in 2004, the year of its release in Germany.

At the beginning of the novel, Abel Nema lives with his mother in an unnamed Balkan country. His father has abandoned them, and after a fruitless search, his mother resigns herself to the fact of his disappearance. Time passes, and as a teen Abel confesses his homosexual attraction to his best friend Ilia. He is spurned and shortly thereafter Ilia disappears in turn, which drives Abel to travel the countryside, where he resumes his mother’s search for his father.

Abel manages to find one of his father’s former paramours and is invited to stay the night, where he nearly dies of carbon monoxide poisoning. Hospitalized, he wakes up a changed man, with an incredible facility for learning languages and an attendant disability for just about everything else, including any semblance of a sense of direction or a desire to talk. When war break out in the Balkans, Abel flees and manages, utilizing his linguistic abilities, to create an academic life in Central Europe, where his bizarre, child-like manner drives everyone he meets to either fall in love with him, unaccountably, or hate him for no reason.

Habitually wandering the streets, and with little volition of his own, except for studying or drinking at an all-night sex club, where he never manages to get drunk, Abel falls in with the underbelly of refugee society, living for a time with a half-sane collector of the broken down and abandoned, Konstantin, and later living in a debauched and carnivalesque atmosphere with an even less sane woman, Kinga, and the band of musicians for whom she alternately serves as muse, lover and mother. Eventually, Abel finds some version of normalcy in the person of Mercedes, whom Abel marries to acquire legal status, and her pre-pubescent son Omar, whom he tutors in Russian, until some of Abel’s less savory secrets come to life and everything is thrown into disarray.

Terezia Mora chooses to tell the story of Abel from the perspective of everyone who comes into contact with him. That perspective changes from moment to moment throughout the story—sometimes shifting from a third person narration to a first person narration in the middle of a sentence—and doesn’t give the reader much aid in coming to understand her main character, who ends up as a cipher. He wanders from place to place aimlessly, and, because he has no apparent will of his own, much of the story moves forward through coincidence, he lives with this person, he lives with that person, he runs into trouble while he’s lost in this and such a place, or he simply disappears from certain situations with no explanation.

Perhaps Mora intended for Able Nema to serve as a stand-in for the rootlessness and desperation of existence as a Balkan refugees, or the refugee life in general, but the character she has placed at the center of the story is unable to bear that symbolic weight. His psychic absence leaves a large hole in the center of the narrative where our concern for him as a character, as a being inhabiting this created world, should be.

It isn’t until the final pages of the novel that we are allowed to peek behind Abel Nema’s curtain, and then it happens in a borderline hackneyed section where he takes psychedelic drugs and travels through a psychologically revealing dreamscape.

All in all: I have nothing to complain about. Not that I understand what it means, but most of the time I was: happy. Apart from the ruptures—I don’t know, can one say: in time?—when it suddenly became intolerable, neither life nor death but a third thing man was not made for, when a flood of repulsion, of fear overcomes you and carries you off not to pain, no, not even that, but into nothingness, nothingness, nothingness, until at a certain point, like water, it slows down and passes into an idyllic splish-splash, and I, the flotsam and jetsam, remain behind on the shore.

Brief pause to allow me to utter the following words—which in their entirety, not one by one, are for various personal reasons holy to me—with the requisite space: Sometimes, I say, I am filled to the brim with love and devotion, so much so that I practically cease to be myself. My longing to see and understand them is so great that I wish to be the air between them so they can inhale me and I sink into their every cell. Then there are timers I am so overcome with repulsion when I see them before me, their cadaver mouths eating and drinking and talking, and everything in them turns to muck and lies and I feel that if I have to see and hear them one second more I’ll give the next face I see such a drubbing that there won’t be anything left when I am through with it.

By this point in the story it’s too late. We’ve already spent more than 300 pages with a character we know very little about and for whom we have been given little reason to empathize. Day In Day Out is an ambitious novel—Michael Henry Heim’s translation is incredible, as usual—and Terezia Mora has thrown a lot of writing at it, but it falls flat in too many cases to realize its goals.

Day In Day Out
By Terézia Mora
translated by Michael Henry Heim
Ecco
$14.95, 432 pgs.