Flashback

Pity the foreign writer. Once he or she has the good fortune to be discovered by an American agent or editor sufficiently sober to recognize talent through the haze of smoke and hype at some Frankfurt Book Fair bierstube or some Barcelona bacalao joint, once the most recent novel is published to great acclaim in English (“The Japanese Updike!” “The Swedish Tan!”), there comes the inevitable question: What next?

The typical answer: whatever came before. After all, the process of discovering foreign literary talent seems to be enervating enough that the market can bear only one, perhaps two writers from any given country. From South America we have Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Colombia), Mario Vargas Llosa (Peru), Jorge Amado (Brazil), Jorge Luis Borges (Argentina). Each of these writers found his career by moving backward through his juvenilia once his breakthrough book found acclaim in El Norte.

The track record in Europe is not much better. It is through such a process that Peter Nadas became the king of the Hungarian Empire (at least in the United States) in 1998 with the publication of the virtuosic “A Book of Memories,” a triumph that led to the appearance, one year later, of “The End of a Family Story.” Both novels speak to an American sense of the repression and secrecy that existed behind the Iron Curtain in the bad cold days before 1989. Whether the books were read with the same sense of context that Hungarian readers brought to them was immaterial. They were well-written, enjoyable books that gave the reader a pleasurable feeling of the discovery of a world suspected but never seen.

One year further down the road, Nadas’ American publisher brings out “Love,” a slim novel that was originally published in Hungarian in 1979. In contrast to the historical sweep of its predecessors, “Love” focuses on two individuals, a man and his lover. “At the table I was sitting in the armchair, half naked. All the paraphernalia on the table. A pack of cigarettes. Grass in a small plastic bag. Scissors, matches. A sheet of clean paper. She takes a cigarette out of the pack, then a matchstick from the matchbox. With the match she scoops out the tobacco, careful not to graze the fine paper shell of the cigarette. I am not leaning back. My shirt is on the backrest of the armchair, her green dress spread out over my shirt. She likes to walk around naked; it’s hot.”

So far, so good--we may be in the electron-microscopic territory of Alain Robbe-Grillet, but the details are at least appealing. Soon, we discover, our hero intends to leave his lover. Then comes the predicament. Problem is, the predicament is all too familiar to American readers who lived and loved through the ‘60s and ‘70s: Our hero gets too stoned to move. “I’d like to say something; there’s something I’d like to tell you, but I can’t because of this laughter . . . ‘You!’ . . . I simply must laugh at something; what is this all-fulfilling laughter from which I cannot extricate myself?” We’ve heard this kind of thing before, we American readers say to ourselves, Cheech and Chong, circa 1979.

And yet the humor is at a distance, as if the mere description of being stoned is foreign enough to entertain. “So then this is reality and everything that’s happened until now is only imagination. We’ve fallen asleep. It was a dream. I rise a little, her hand slips under my back. She’s squeezing me. I squeeze her to myself. But it’s no use. Although I can feel the squeeze, her body does not seem palpable.” The clock stops. The hero feels that he is stuck in a perpetual 12:30 a.m., no matter how his brain ticks and his body jumps around the room or asks for a glass of water. And over the course of 20 more pages, Nadas shifts from the pharmacological to the metaphysical. This also sounds familiar. After all, from the cave to “The Matrix,” from Rene Descartes to Kahlil Gibran, questions of reality and illusion have plagued highbrows and lowlifes for centuries. Is this life or merely a play, do I wake or sleep, is it live or is it Memorex?

*

Insanity, as Dostoevsky reminded us more than 100 years ago (and Shakespeare 300 before that), is only one short skip away once we start smoking philosophy. “The refuge of madness,” the man ponders, “is the kind of final refuge that verifies not the existence of death as a subject, to which I have fled, but on the contrary, the existence of the verb, the fleeing itself. In other words, it doesn’t mean that with the help of death I might be out of my madness but rather that I have sunk even deeper into the logic of my madness.”

So what is the answer? Happily, Nadas’ hero lives to see another morn, tedious though it may be. But sadly, the publication of this very slight, very dated piece of old news leaves a dry stale taste of the roaches of yesteryear. One rejoices that the student of Nadas, the English reader who has no access to the writer in the original Hungarian, can triangulate his brilliant career. One worries at the same time that such a nonrepresentative whiff might discourage a new reader from Nadas’ greater works. That would be a bummer, man.