When Ismail Kadare, the Albanian novelist, took home the first International Man Booker prize this month and we were left scratching our heads—Kadare, who? Apparently we are not alone in our xenophobic reading habits. The kind folks over at The Guardian shared our pain and even offered an essential top ten list of books in translation.
Here at the Happy Booker we've taken a few steps toward adding some international titles to our reading list. And we've asked Doug Merrill, a freelance writer, editor, Euro-blogger and international man of mystery, to help us out. Doug stops by today to share his review of Tibor Fischer's Under the Frog. I am sure you will make him feel right at home.
Under the Frog, reviewed by Doug Merrill
I don't know of many funny books about Communism, let alone about the period of high Stalinism, between the end of the war and his death. Camp memoirs, histories, Solzhenitsyn, many of them brilliant, searing works. And then there's Under the Frog, by Tibor Fischer.
Fischer took the title from a Hungarian expression about how low things can go: under a frog's ass (a béka segge alatt). I had originally heard the expression as "under a frog's ass at the bottom of a well," so apparently things in Hungary can get very bad indeed.
Fischer captures it all with a drollness that fits both the country's history and the absurdity of Communism.
"The gramphone player was [the lead character's brother] Istvan's. Istvan and the gramophone player were about all that was left of the Hungarian Second Army. Istvan had got the portable gramophone player as a present from [his father] Elek when he set off to the front in '41. Gyuri [the lead character] had no idea how much it had cost, but fortunes were involved; there had been German generals who didn't have the sort of musical recreation enjoyed by the Hungarian artillery lieutenant. The Hungarian Second Army, like all Hungarian armies, had the unfortunate habit of getting wiped out. Istvan returned, flayed and dented by shrapnel, even though 200,000 other Hungarians didn't. Even more miraculously, the gramophone player had been returned home months later by one of Istvan's comrades-in-arms. Istvan had no objections to Gyuri permanently borrowing it."
Gyuri is nearing the end of school when the Russians drive the Germans out of Budapest.
"The Germans weren't looking so confident now, the prospect of getting mashed by the Russians not agreeing with them. It would have been fun to watch if it hadn't been for the fact that the mashing was going to take place in Budapest. From the direction of the City Park [a couple hundred yards from where I used to live] Gyuri could hear the distant rumbling of artillery, the mighty footfalls of the Red Army."
After the battle, Gyuri and his best friend Pataki get pressed into a little clean-up duty: "Waving his submachine gun, the davai guitar, in the winning way the Ivans had, he succinctly expressed his wish that they should load up some of his fallen comrades onto the lorry. Having made clear the task, the soldier set off for some investigative looting."
School resumes, with many students among the casualties but none, to Gyuri's chagrin, among the teachers he had hoped might not return. One inquires in all seriousness whether he had used the extra time to broaden his research on a project that is already late. "Fischer, Fischer, this is deplorable. You can't let a little war interfere with serious scholarship. You know our history. As a Hungarian you should be prepared for the odd cataclysm."
And Stalinism turns out to be an odd cataclysm. Gyuri and Pataki fall into one thing or another, eventually ending up as basketball players on the team sponsored by the national railroad. Locomotive is a good first-division team, though not a contender for the championship like the army or secret police teams-the army could draft any player it really wanted, and the secret police could both gain players and arrest opponents. (In the Soviet Union, there was such a feud between the secret police team and the team run by Stalin's son that it eventually became a state scandal.)
This setup gives the author an excuse to get the characters out and about in the country during a time when travel was strictly controlled. While rolling in the Locomotive team's rail car, Gyuri dreams of escape from Hungary; as he grows up, he finds he doesn't fit in the system, and there's no way around it. (Brother Istvan doesn't do too badly. "He had returned from his years on the Russian front with one important souvenir: the inability to get worked up about things that weren't three years on the Russian front.")
Fischer also sets up comic incidents at the sham job Gyuri and Pataki have to cover their basketball playing, along the way showing how absurd daily life in the planned economy was. Another running gag is walk-on characters who talk about how bad things have gotten and observe "This can't go on much longer."
Both get arrested by the secret police, Gyuri as the victim of a stitch-up over a girl he doesn't like that much to begin with. The other suitor is in the secret police, and in 1950, that was enough.
Eventually, of course, Gyuri falls in love with someone else, and she astonishes him by falling too. Just in time for the revolution of 1956 and another bout with Soviet tanks. The beginning of the revolution is absurd-a crowd at the radio station mouthing off to a secret policeman-but not funny. Gyuri is grown up, facing adult choices and live bullets.
