"This" "Author" "Loves" "To" "Put" "Things" "In" "Quotes"...I am not sure the point of this, but it can get kind of "annoying"..."See" "what" "I" "mean".....As far as the story goes, pretty good so far, though I do not know what's going on really...I hope it will reveal itself to me...As far as I know, some old woman was being chased on a train and harassed by an unshaven man in an overcoat..(this was a pretty interesting scenario and well described)...then she is at her apartment and some friend she hates comes over and is harassing her...then she went for a walk, gets harassed some more and then sees a huge trailer driving through the town with some weird circus...then she has a monologue about some revolution shit and apathy or something while walking near the center of town while some dudes hang around fires and harass her yet again. Something tells me this character is prone to harassment... Anyways, I am pretty lost right now...I think she is thinking to herself about things...or its the friend that's thinking...I am totally confused and you probably are too by this review... I am not sure what's going on as of now..I am having difficulty reading the book, not because the author is bad, convoluted, or difficult to follow due to long and drawn out scenes; but because I did not properly learn to read and comprehend until roughly the 9th grade...This should come as no surprise to you all...Apparently reading/writing is still an issue with me that has gone unresolved and unforeseen for all these years and has been masked behind condescending snide remarks to anyone that brings it to my attention...I suppose this is a defense mechanism...My apologies to those I have hurt in the past...Anyways, the author elaborates on situations, thoughts, and events in an almost obsessive/long winded way, which is a bit cool and original, though confusing sometimes... At times, the writing seems a bit amateury(?) I think ...Though in the very next sentences, it has windows of beautifully written work (see below quotes)... I can't make heads or tails of this book...I don't know...I am being "patient" though. This is something I have been meaning to work on...Hopefully I can maintain this "patience" much like I can maintain the patience of balding and getting fat and old...Wow, disregard everything earlier. This book just got a whole three times better starting on page 63 "the werkmeister harmonies"...Unfortunately, this review got a hundred times worse...Whatever you write one then, lazy asshole...I'm going to the western bar in town tonight... its ladies night.... Perhaps I will get lucky...I can't believe you have read this far...OK, I didn't get lucky at the shitty western bar, fuckin' bullshit...Anyways, the story has started to fuckin' (sorry, I am in a sweary mood) suck again and be boring and drawn out. All that misanthropy shit has vanished. I don't know... I can't follow this shit! I am going to finish though, for all you people that follow my wonderful reviews (no one cares...)...I will suffer to get through it! Mark my words!!!!(no one cares, no one is even reading these shitty reviews, you jackass). I know how important this is to everyone!! (people don't find this important at all, get off your high horse, you pompous retard)...Shit, now it is good again. There is a lot going on here with comparing reality to what is ideal. Coming to terms with reality and our fantasies. This is well illustrated with the reference to trying to hit a nail with a hammer and the results. The actual hitting of the nail and what we visually in our minds. How I say it sounds trite and dumb, but it is well explained in the book... Quite interesting and some profound, deeply philosophical stuff...Some Nietzche stuff and some Kant stuff come to mind (like I know who those people are and what they wrote)...Why is this review so goddamn long, Jesus...Remember when I had a girlfriend and a healthy and active social life and didn't have to resort to writing these shitty reviews? Anything involving the Professor of Musicology (Professor Eszter) is cool. Every time you read his name or read him speaking, cool shit is about to happen...Well, nothing really matters and people get swept up in things (revolution in this case), I guess that’s the Melancholy of Resistance. It’s kind of all bullshit or something. I feel the idea was that people were swept up in political ideology and couldn’t fully express this in reality so it turned to violence? I don’t know…They needed a leader, but didn’t have one and couldn’t think for themselves in how to express their lack of individual power so in frustration, they turned to violence?? Striving to search for humanity in life, but usually the opposite occurs?? Striving for perfection, ideology versus reality and the escape from boredom and banality of life? People not knowing why they do things, and just do them for no good reason? I don’t know…The story never clearly defined why people were acting violently and revolutionary the way they were, which left it a bit mysterious to what drives certain movements…conformity? Emotions? Magic? All that was defined was the charismatic cigar wielding circus master and the whale…these where reasons for the revolution??? They came to town and whipped the town into a frenzy…from boredom?? I don’t know, I am making this probably way more complicated than it should be and asking open ended dumb questions… sorry…We don’t define what is happening until after the fact and in retrospect (Mrs. Eszter becoming a powerful figure in the end)…I don’t know…This was some dense shit at times……sorry…I will stop trying to be analytical…Anyways, the book jumps around a lot and can be hard to follow…Also, the translation is amazing (done by George Szirtes). I could not find one error, which is pretty impressive considering most translations blow and are done very half assed…Somewhere I read that Melancholy of Resistance is comparable to Gogol. I guess this is most apparent in the last 20 pages or so. A situation occurs involving a man, an overcoat, and getting stabbed. This is very similar to “the overcoat” by Gogol. I feel it was a nod to Gogol during this part. However, this is the only similarity I can make between Gogol and this book. I could be wrong, I am no Gogol expert…The last 4 pages of the book are absolutely genius…It touches on the Plato’s writ at large, about politics, revolution, death, life, decomposition, chemical changes…Everlasting life…Everything and all will change form and stuff alike…And nothing really make’s sense…sorry for dumbing this part down and stripping it of all artistic merit, I am not a genius writer…what I read is just shitted out here absent of any redeeming quality…sorry…The book ends with some pleasant meta stuff… I would give it four stars but between the beginning and the ending, there is a whole lot of bullshit to tolerate… for the most part (except quotes below and when Professor Eszter is in the picture). Because of that, I feel I wasted a lot of time when this book could have been way shorter…I felt obligated to finish the book because I lived in Budapest for a year and felt somewhat connected to it…Not that you care….Anyways, the movie is better…Below is the link…Watch it!...Anyways I am glad it is all over...Jesus...Quotes:"...such things would serve no purpose since the world will quite happily fall apart by itself and go to wrack and ruin so that everything may begin again, and so proceed ad infinitum and this is as perfectly clear,' he raised his eyes to the ceiling, 'as our helpless orbiting in space" once started it cannot be stopped.' Eszter shut his eyes. 'I'm feeling dizzy; I'm dizzy and, God forgive me, bored, like everyone else who has succeeded in ridding himself of the notion that there is any suggestion of rhyme or reason in making or breaking, in birth or death, in this constant and agonizing going round in circles, postulating some enormous wonderful plan rather than a cold, mechanical, blindingly simple movement...""Because he wanted to forget everything he had had to suffer during the decades of his so-called directorship of the academy of music: those grinding attacks of idiocy, the blank ignorant look in people's eyes, the utter lack of burgeoning intelligence in the young, the rotten smell of spirtual dullness and the oppressive power of pettiness, smugness and low expectation under the weight of which he himself had almost collapsed. He wanted to forget the urchins who eyes unmistakably glittered with a desire to set about that hated piano with an axe; the Grand Symphony Orchestra he was obliged to assemble from the ranks of assorted drunken tutors and misty-eyed music lovers; the thunderous applause with which the unsuspecting but enthusiastic public, month after month, rewarded this scandalous, unimaginably awful band of incompetents whose slender talents were not fit to grace a village wedding...in short, 'the whole breeding ground of dark stupidity'...""we are simply the miserable subjects of some insignificant failure, alone in this simply marvelous creation; that the whole of human history is no more, if I may make myself clear to you, than the histrionics of a stupid, bloody, miserable outcast in an obscure corner of a vast stage, a kind of tortured confession of error, a slow acknowledgement of the painful fact that this creation was not necessarily a brilliant success.""the exclusively human capacity for mind numbing levels of neglect and indifference was, beyond a doubt, truly limitless.""No trumpets, no riders of the apocalypse but mankind swallowed without a fuss or ceremony by its own rubbish? 'not an altogether surprising end,'""The only revolutionary feeling he was aware of, or so he considered while standing in the doorway, was pride, his own pride, a pride that did not allow him to understand that there was no qualitative difference between things, a presumptuous over-confidence which condemned him to ultimate disillusion, for to live according to the spirit of qualitative difference requires superhuman qualities.""He adjusted his deep-claret-coloured smoking jacket, linked the fingers of his hands together behind his neck, and, as he noticed the feeble ticking of his watch, suddenly realized that he had been escaping all his life, that life had been a constant escape, escape from meaningless into music, from music to guilt, from guilt and self-punishment into pure ratiocination, and finally escape from that too, that it was retreat after retreat, as if his guardian angel had, in his own peculiar fashion, been steering him to the antithesis of retreat, to an almost simple-minded acceptance of things as they were, at which point he understood that there was nothing to be understood, that if there was reason in the world it far transcended his own, and that therefore it was enough to notice and observe that which he actually possessed."“…it simply didn’t exist; and thinking this he fully acknowledged for the first time the justice of Mr. Eszter’s contention that chaos really was the natural condition of the world and, this being eternally the case, you simply couldn’t begin to predict the course of events. It’s not even worth trying, thought Valuska, and wiggled his aching toes inside his cold boots; it’s as pointless to predict as to judge, since even the words ‘chaos’ and ‘outcome’ are entirely redundant, there being nothing one can posit as their antitheses, which further implies that the very act of naming is enough to put paid to them, for ‘there is simply one damned thing after another’- this was etched into their very meaning- so any connection they might appear to have with each other is wholly based on a series of confusing contradictions.”“Anyone who believes that the world is maintained through the grace of some force for good or beauty, dear friend, is doomed to early disillusion.”'This part is after the person speaking committed some brutal crimes….“I dunno how you see it, I mean whether, what with my record, I could still be a policeman, but when Vulture came round to see if I felt like volunteering, provided I told you everything dead straight, I thought…yea, Ill volunteer…’cause, me, I think I could be a useful member of society, though I dunno what you think about this couple of mistakes I made, I mean, well…”**“…that, beside its own ignorance, the public prized nothing so much as novelty, the greater the novelty the better, and the thing they treated in such a whimsical fashion was the very thing they most voraciously demanded.”
The Melancholy of Resistance is, George Szirtes says, ‘a slow lava flow of narrative, a vast black river of type’. And because I adore Szirtes, the poet, I chose to imbue his summation with promises of a linguistic operetta of multifactorial continuo. Alas, he too must earn his daily bread, (being the novel’s translator) and so it transpires, at the end of this epic polity, that he meant what he said entirely literally: a statement of fact rather than a literary endorsement.A vast black river of lava is what it says on the tin, and exactly what this novel delivers: an unrelenting pummelling of words undistracted by paragraphs or full stops: therefore, it must be stream of consciousnessness, (says the Guardian, the New Yorker, the Times, etc. All hail). A stream of consonants more like, a black morass of type which settles every inch of the mis-en-scene and piles on in thick layers, purporting an emphemeral promise of imminent unravelling which never quite crystallises. This linguistic technique has as its main function the architecture of a frieze layering of shallow planes that work against any privileging of the center: instead, it is the oscillating viewpoint which invests the grammar of the message, a viewpoint which is not a subjective, located, space but rather bleeds off the edges of the page, chasing a ‘reverse perspective’ vantage point. It does not demand a point of identification at which the viewer is interpellated into the chronology of the image, but rather presses on, buoyed by the irreducible thickness of its hypnotic and undecipherable content. It is precisely this which makes the novel ‘difficult’: a lack of marshalling of centrifugal cohesion or ancillary anchorage of any kind.The above is my countertake to the prevailing mantra in newspaper reviews that what we are dealing with here is a postmodernist linguistic architecture that operates like a multifacedted lens that refracts the world into multiple viewpoints simultaneously: which crops up in some derivative form ad nauseum lest the reviewer be caught with their pants down in some metaphysical great white Hungarian post soviet modernist debate. Which comes a cropper. A vast black river of type is what this is folks: no more, no less. And if ever a book needed a wee paragraph, or two, well, look no further...The title, then: a piece of flummoxery which has nothing to do with the ominous atmosphere precipitated by the advent of a touring circus towing a leviathan pickled whale, entouraged by its groupies: ostensibly a refractory group of anarchistic revolutionaries who catalyze the host town’s entropy into a night of murder and mayhem. The literal translation of the title is apparently ‘opposition melancholy of’ which , Hungarian speaker that I’m not, still renders itself to an interpretation or two: why should it not be the opposition of melancholy, which makes infinite more sense: a galvanising of complacency into resurrection, a nihilistic, anarchistic disruption of the status quo: insert own take here: Hungary’s complacency with both Nazi and Soviet occupation: why not, JSTOR emanates have done it. A cleansing of the national palate so to speak. But no reason to stop with mere historical reconciliations: the story serves as an overarching magnus opus(sic)of the ever enduring political zeitgeist: the exploitation of mass hysteria, and using the mechanism of violence to construct a new political hegemony. And in the meantime, brush up on Hobbes, Kafka and Kleist, Dostoyevsky, Goethe and even Dante, to name but just a few who in whose tradition this is. Now, I don’t care whose tradition this is in, all I care about is how bad it is. Nevertheless, if we’re going to name drop shamelessly here, its not like I have nothing to say (which is the case with me even when I have nothing to say). The controlling concept here is a Pavel Florenskian antinomial rendering of the truth in the nature of political systems, informed by Hans Magnus Enzenberger’s marvellous ‘the consciousness industry’ principle (that the product of the mind is the perpetuation of the existing Order of man’s domination over man).Further, is it a coincidence that the rampaging hordes seem to be orchestrated by a nebulous persona called ‘The Prince’ and in what is the only sublime sub context-within-text coup de grace in the whole novel, and that these hordes are equally and simultaneously manoeuvred in a parallel paradigm by the Machiavellian Mrs Ezter? She, who orchestrates a series of complex machinations behind the scenes worthy of a supreme Svengali, a masterful Machievelli: given advance warning of possible unrest, she decides to let the scenario play out so that she might intervene at the precise moment and ‘save the day’: too early and the plan comes a cropper, too late and her role will be swept into the disarrange of anarchy: plotting a tight high wire act, she calls in the army just in time, incapacitates the chief of police with copious drink, dispatches Valuska (the only person who might adivine her evil intentions) on a wild good chase, and, does it eight times (eight !!!!) with the army lieutenant Commander, in one night no less, which allows her to assume chief comrade secretary leader of the people something or other status. World domination, muahaaaha! (although I remain more impressed with the eight times in one night achievement myself).Character portrayal and deployment remains overall poor, with the exception of Valuska. Given there are only four main characters, this is a disappointment. Even in retrospect, I fail to see what purpose, message or qualia Mrs Plauf brings to the overarching narrative, apart from some comic relief in the opening scenes when she falls victim to that all too well known to ‘siteration’ in which a male specimen gets it into his head that a woman has the hots for him, and advances on a leery course to collect his dues (why is it never the Brad Pitts of the world who labour under such misapprehensions: although granted in that case it wouldn’t quite be a misapprehension, like anyone would say no to THAT). In a hilarious Bridget Jones moment poor Ms Plauff’s bra strings snap whilst she is sitting in a rickety train, and she is faced with the dilemma of whether to cover up : and bring attention to herself, or let it all go, which she does, in a wibble-wobbly concertina which drives her smarmy admirer mad with passion. (just can’t win this one, I’m afraid. Damned if you do or don’t).Fly-away boobs and a near miss mile high club (except on a train) aside, Mrs Plauff is a catstrophe of a trope: its as if though Krasznahorkai doesn’t know what to do with her. Just as she settles comfortably into spinster stereotype lifted straight from the anals of ‘the Prime of Ms Jean Brodie’ complete with conserves, chintz and poppycock lace behind closed doors, we learn she has actually buried two husbands and kicked out her unpromising son, Valuska, the proverbial village idiot. There is no way her maidenly histrionics read true after that bit of biography. But more so, the derisory notion that that a respectable pillar of a small town community can discard her son to communal upkeeping, whilst at the same time subscribing to the social ostracization petition against Mrs Eszter for not living with her husband. Enough already. ‘Buts its all a bit of magical realism’, extols the Guardian Review. Really? Did I blink and miss that part? Magical realism is The Master and Margarita. Or Donosos’s ‘the Obscene Bird or Midnight’. Not this. (unless we are referring to the eight times in one night?) This novel: why, its the Emperor’s new clothes, after all.Or, in the words of Charles Newman, a supreme example of 'climax inflation': pervasive in the current cultural malaise of searching out and force-finding of postmodernist recontextualizing in all kinds of verbal diarrhea so long as it was spewed in the context of the last twenty years of so: the primary sensation of our time.
Do You like book The Melancholy Of Resistance (2002)?
I open the covers and am on a train. Noisy and disordered, Mrs. Plauf, a conventional middle class woman returning from her yearly sojourn to visit her disabled and housebound sisters, sits among peasants. The order of the country has been disrupted and trains no longer run on schedule. The class system is blurred and separation of class distinction disintegrating.. She thinks only of returning to her apartment and all the objects within providing her comfort. They are all there and she relaxes until visited by her embarrassment of a son who lives life to study the sky, planets, to talk about the eclipse once witnessed and its meaning. Having no interest in practical life he is scoffed at and in danger of being locked up as insane. His visit is followed by a politically ambitious woman who praises Mrs. Plauf's objects while hypocritically deriding them in her mind. She wants to see who can aid her ambitions. What the people are like.Some in this town enjoy their honest labor and family. Most are wed to a false security where repetition offers them false solace and an illusory safety of security. They readily accept and defend even if objects are reduced to the physics of their contours, the web of practicality, the skein of poetic imagery they contain abandoned. I feel the tension quietly building within the long winding paragraphs I wander. It is not clear if the town's sudden signs of instability arrived out of chance or were delivered from the heated kiln of those with authority. I join the characters in wanting reasons, someone to blame, someone to fix it. Someone to guide me through these paragraphs snaking on for a page or pages with no sign posts.Posters herald a circus coming to town. They will bring strange people to fear. Fear brings action. Action birthed out of fear brings about what the fearful people are afraid of. A rebellion crafted by the authorities to further entrench their hollow and ever growing hunger for power which will never fill the gaping holes inside? Is the circus exactly what is feared? Is it a con-job moving from place to place with its group of hooligans readied to plunder the town before moving on? Beyond the people's fear that any change will only make life worse could the circus be an amphitheater for creation that grows and expands with the innovation of artistic creation? But the endless paragraphs? The wending serpents slime?Here I meet Krasznahorkai. He has come upon a snake. One that coils and hisses. It only know its instinct of being and following itself. Krasznahorkai had different ideas? He has now I believe, as I search my way through another paragraph missing any anchor for me to clutch onto, cleaved onto his own earnestness, honestness, to follow the snake. It winds, slips, slithers in its direction through the paragraphs filled with simple words blending into the kingdom of deeper metaphoric meanings. Krasznahorkai's entire system of beliefs, values, and perceptions of himself and the world, of his art may be threatened. Too late, this is a story of a snake who leaves in its instinct ridden path unmarked paragraphs, leaving me within its pages unsettled. Always unsettled Krasznahorkai knows he has the heart to follow the snake to its end. The questions answered or not, the external strife of power and fear, the internal strife of the artist, the snake will not be fluted in a dance out of a hat. Krasznahorkai has risked it all. Exhausted he has followed the snake to its end. Kept on the trail without the beat of his own stride he is wending with the snake's curls and knowing juts and coils, its dark crawl into the never ending circularity of events, so brisk and innovative during its moments, but already showing its tell-tale signage of repeating that which it just replaced, never ending in its tail-nipped recurrence.I however am left within the waves of paragraphs, not lost but returned, revisited, by the unrolling of their mystified wisdom.
—Stephen P
László Krasznahorkai, I am nervous. Isn't that ridiculous? I'm actually nervous about writing a review for your novel The Melancholy of Resistance because I just finished scanning through the (few) other reviews on this site and saw that they were mostly perfunctory in their praise, somewhat soulless and academic, and insufficiently rapturous. This is an amazing book! Don't they understand that? When you've heard the word of god (and here it is), you just don't dither around with propriety or the bone-dry language of theory. You jump up and down and run up to strangers and shake them and slobber and cry and sputter, OMG OMG OMG! And let me reassure you that I am very, very stingy with my enthusiasms and my ecstasies. I'm not Gene Shalit or the Sixty Second Movie Review or some idiot naïf who's floored by the slightest registerable stimulus. This is what this book did to me. It woke me up in the middle of the night last night -- there, on my cheap lacquered IKEA nightstand. It veritably hummed with menace (and intimacy too) and demanded to be finished. It was midnight, or whenever-it-was... because, really, who consults clocks or bothers heeling to their increments when one is summoned -- yes, summoned to follow a course as needful and endemic as one's own pulse? Krasznahorkai enslaved me. There's no better way to put it. I was tempted to say that I was spellbound by the novel -- which is true, I guess, but doesn't go far enough or address the muscularity of the novel's powers. Spells (in the vernacular) are airy and fantastic, but slavery is more consciously willful. You can feel the master's force and bearing in every word. This isn't the vague twilight of spells, but the fullest night of abjection. Krasznahorkai, I am yours.Immediately after finishing the final eighty-or-so pages, in the middle of the night, I had to start re-watching the film based on (or inspired by) the novel, Béla Tarr’s Werckmeister Harmonies, because how can you just nod off to sleep after you’ve been so dominated and terrorized by a novel? You can’t. There’s so much to think through, and the intensity does not easily yield to the evenness that sleep requires. Even though Krasznahorkai cowrote the screenplay of Werckmeister with Tarr -- and it is a good film -- it is (sad to say) lacking even as an homage to the book or its strange, all-consuming power. Tarr fails at capturing the menace or properly defining his characters. We are on such intimate terms with the characters in the novel that it comes as a rude shock that Valuska, the protagonist (played by a very Klaus Kinski-ish actor), is reduced to the status of mere cipher in the film. He seems to have no substance specifically belonging to himself. The other characters don’t fare much better as Tarr obsesses on their uncanniness rather than their humanity.But back to the book, for a moment. I’ve failed to reveal a thing about it and only alluded to or attempted to suggest its strength. I must confess that I’ve been avoiding dealing with the brute matter of the novel because abstracted as such, it's not a very persuasive enticement. The novel is the story of the end of the world, in a way, by way of acknowledging that the world will persist, linger, drag on even after its raison d’être, its motivations, its meaning have collapsed. Valuska is an ‘idiot’ in the Dostoyevskian sense -- a young idealist still open-mouthed in his wonder at the world -- no, at the whole universe. As expected, his ‘purity’ is the subject of confusion, some admiration, but mostly ridicule and contempt. Even at the brink of civilization’s disintegration, he is invested with a passion and optimism that condemns him as the fool. His Hungarian hometown has been taken over by ‘strange’ happenings [or are they really so strange?] that the suspicious townspeople interpret as omens of terrible things to come. The culminating symbol is the arrival of a circus that scarcely deserves that name, since it seems to include only two exhibits: a giant, preserved whale in a truck trailer and a mysterious unseen Prince, deformed and rumored to reign over or impel the sinister happenings in the town… such as the arrival of hundreds of sullen men, followers of the circus, who wait, speechless, in the town square in small huddles. Waiting for what, exactly? The townspeople stay indoors and expect the worst -- some sort of provincial apocalypse, perhaps. But does the Prince bring about the mob’s menace and its chilling denouement or is he merely a convenient outside force on which to blame the worst impulses of mankind?
—David
There are better reviews than this one to read about this book. Here is one. And another. And a third one. (For those who don't know if they want to click, those link to David's, Brian's and Mariel's reviews). I had very strong feelings of fondness but not love for this book. It would have been a four and a half star book, but it never had that unquantifiable something that pushes a book past the really really like category and into the love category. Maybe I'm just being a superficial bastard and if the book had had paragraphs I would have loved it. Who knows. When I started reading this book on my way to work on Tuesday I was a little tired. When I continued reading it on break I was also feeling tired, and I felt the same way on my subway ride home. My eyes would blur on the pages of unbroken text, and I would lose my place at times as I read the first seventy five pages. At times my mind went into that strange place that borders on being awake and asleep, and the words on the page mixed with barely subconscious thoughts and memories and become something of a mix between personal memory and the story in the book. Even though I'd catch myself and re-read the parts when this would happen I'm still not positive that my memory of the first quarter of the book is very accurate. One of my difficulties with the book (and this isn't a difficulty that would dock a star, but a difficulty meaning something that haunts my thoughts, and probably begs for the book to be re-read at a later point) is putting my finger on what the failure of the two major characters Valuska and Eszter is. I don't mean failure in being characters in the book, because they are not failures at all in that respect, but the moment when each of them experiences their downfall, so to speak. They are both idiots. Valuska is one because the town has decided that he is one with his starry eyed gaze to the heavens and Eszter is one even though he is considered the the town genius who thinks things too lofty for the town to understand. The irony of the way these two characters are viewed by the town is that Valuska's dreamy thoughts are actually grounded in science, although a wide eyed raptured view of the magnificence of just how big and awe-inspiring the world is once you have an idea of some of the reality that is out there beyond the day to day world. Against Valuska's 'idiot' is Eszter who is almost a Derrida like figure who spits out deep and profound pronouncements that are almost entirely abstract from the real world. Eszter lives as a recluse, hiding from the town and the world that he sees as a dismal failure. Not being out on the streets, as Valuska is, everyday gazing up at the sky's like Aristophanes' Socrates Eszter is given respect and people treat his rare public ramblings with respect. The comic figure of Eszter really comes through in a scene where he is trying to board up the windows to his house. He knows that bad shit is about to go down out on the streets and he takes it on himself to barricade himself in his home. For someone who hasn't read this book, the scene is important because for years Eszter hasn't done anything for himself. He lays down all day while a Valuska brings him his food and a woman comes to keep the house in order. Barricading the windows by nailing up boards is a big step for him. The scene begins with him hammering the hand that is holding the nail for the fourth or fifth time. He has beaten his hand to a pulp and he is trying to figure out why he keeps missing the nail. Instead of going about hammering the nail like a normal person would (little taps to drive the nail in to start and then hitting harder when the fingers are no longer in the way) he works out complicated theories based on velocity and arcs and how much attention he should pay to speed and other aspects of what would normally be unconscious in a person who is able to hammer in a nail. Through a painful trial and error he finally hits upon the correct way of doing the task, and rejoices and finds an enjoyment in skillfully wielding a hammer. By the time he stumbles on the correct way to do this task he has beaten his hand to a pulp and gone through a ridiculous series of trial and error that led to the correct result but the method he took to get here is far from correct. We never see Valuska hammering in a nail but I imagine he wouldn't have to almost break his left hand in figuring out how to do this relatively simple task. A moment comes later in the book where Eszter sees how ridiculous he has been and in that realization he sets out to find and save Valuska. It is only at this moment that he goes from being a comical idiot figure to being tragic. His own self-awareness coincides with his downfall. His story ends with him tuning a piano from an obscure tuning system to the conventional 12 tone Werckmeister one so that he can sit down and play some Bach. He's returned from the world of his own making of abstract thoughts that might have been clever but didn't necessarily have any relevance to the real-world to the real-world but he is now a totally marginalized figure that is locked away as an embarrassing relic of the past. Valuska has a similar downfall when he stops gazing up at the stars and 'buckles down' to the real world. When he begins to be concerned with what is 'important' to everyone else is when his own failure takes place (one has to wonder about the small act that ultimately leads to his fate at the end of the book really does point to a certain idiocy of his, that maybe everyone had been right about him all along). Long before this happens though there is a scene where he takes Eszter out of his house on a mission for Eszter's wife. Eszter is appalled while walking at the amount of garbage that is piled on the streets. Before this scene the garbage isn't mentioned. When the scene is shown through Valuska's eyes the reader learns that it is on this walk that Valuska turns his gaze which is normally fixed on the lofty view of the sky and is aware for the first time at all the rubbish and trash that is piled on the streets. He hides his own knowledge of this from Eszter by continuing to ramble on as he had been up until this point but in his thoughts he is ashamed to discover the squalor of the town he spends so much time walking around but hadn't actually been noticing up until this point. I don't know exactly why I described this scene, it's part of what makes the character of Valuska difficult for me, something that eludes me about him. I wonder if he had kept his eyes on the heavens if things would have turned out better for him, if his own awareness that he didn't have to be the town idiot and he could think like everyone else doomed him to his own fate. Returning to an Aristophanes allusion, if Valuska had kept starring up at the heavens would he have been able to see the tortoise shell that was falling straight for his head? The part of both of these characters that disturbs me is that there is no easy answer about what their downfall was. Each were doomed when they left their own ivory towers but the way that they each were prior to becoming like everyone else was just as problematic. Maybe when I watch the film version this weekend some of my thoughts will become a bit more substantial. Probably not though. I think eventually I'll need to return to this strange and haunting book.
—Greg
