Latest Review: Metropole by Ferenc Karinthy

It’s an all-Hungarian, all-Karinthy day . . .

Our latest review (already referenced in my earlier post) is of Ferenc Karinthy’s Metropole.

Monica Carter—who runs Salonica World Lit, sells books at Skylight in L.A., and is on the Best Translated Book Award committee—wrote the review of this Kafka-esque tale of a linguist stuck in a country where he doesn’t understand the language and can’t figure out how to escape.

Reading Ferenc Karinthy’s Metropole is like being lost in someone else’s nightmare where there are no exits. Karinthy creates an existential version of hell, stunning the reader not by blatant displays of horrifying circumstances, but by a gradual series of small failures that defeat and degrade the narrator and the reader. The narrator, Budai, takes the wrong door at the transit lounge and instead of going to Helsinki for a linguistics conference his final destination is an unknown city with an unknown language, an unknown nightmare.

Karinthy gives us no reprieve from the beginning. Budai is dropped off at an overcrowded hotel where, after he realizes he is not in Helsinki, decides that he will stay there until the next morning when he can go to the airport to catch a flight to Helsinki. And that’s when the never-ending lines begin. We wait with Budai in a long line until he finally reaches the ticket counter. After attempts to communicate with the receptionist in several languages—French, English, Finnish, Russian and German—he receives a room key after sacrificing his passport. And to another line we go with Budai, this time for the elevator. He spots a sign on the wall, written in the native language, that he attempts to find an identifying factor between this language and others—Cyrillic, Arabic, Chinese and Latin, but without any success. [Click here for the rest.]