Moments of fragility and defeat
Barney Bardsley’s review of Pixel by Krisztina Tóth (Seagull Books) in translation by Owen Good.
The short story is a very particular art. With so much to convey, in so few words, the writer must work hard – and quickly. A satisfying short story has a clear narrative arc that hooks its readers like a fish on a line, and takes them, twisting and turning, on an unpredictable journey to an often unexpected end. Whilst the novel has plenty of time to explain and divert – creating a whole imaginary world of character and plot, into which we can dive and swim – the short story is finished almost before it’s begun. At its best, it is enigmatic and elusive, and slips through our fingers like silk. Did we understand what we have just read? Or should we look again? This is the implicit artistry – and intelligent cunning – of the genre.
Krisztina Tóth is undoubtedly a consummate short story writer. She has been published and translated many times, and Pixel is her first to be published in English. It contains all the elements that one might expect in such a volume: vignettes of human life, in all its humour, pathos and pain; the pages populated by characters of every age and class – from post-war survivors of the holocaust and of the communist regime, like good friends Cosmina and Gavriela, to edgy young city dwellers, riding the Budapest trams, like the wretched glue-sniffer who staggers on board, injured and high as a kite, in The Stomach’s Story. Budapest itself is a focal location in the stories – but Tóth’s reach is much wider than just one country. As well as travelling through time, we travel across borders, to Paris, to Dortmund, to Romania and back. This is a truly European collection.
In a daring innovation, Tóth has decided to link each of her thirty stories together, by the sharing of characters or themes, so that each distinct tale has a connection, in some way, to the others. The people she describes are, as the book’s title suggests, like pixels in an out-of-focus photograph. And as the dictionary definition of pixel suggests, her stories create „a minute area of illumination on a display screen, one of many from which an image is composed.” There are in her stories a bewildering range of characters, of places – of different memories and lives – all of which merge and blur in colourful confusion. Only when the last word of the book is read, will one see the completed picture. And even then – if you blink, the whole image fades back, into the inchoate blur of pixelation. Nothing is as clear as it might seem. Much as our minds and moods change, from minute to minute, in real life, so, too, do the images and stories that Tóth conjures in her writing advance and recede as we read. She is mercurial: a shape shifter, and a sly magician on the page.
And therefore, although it is tempting to consider this book as much a novel as a short story collection – especially since each story is identified by numbered chapter, as well as by individual title – it lacks the narrative cohesion and depth that a novel demands. The book is in any case bolder, more experimental than that. It is deliberately fragmentary and puzzling; defying definition – a creation all its own. Tóth certainly remains loyal to the convention of the short story itself – each tiny narrative within the whole, stands alone and complete. And yet there is a thread of connection, as the various characters appear and re-appear in different combinations and settings. As she writes in the final chapter, „The human body pops up and submerges in time, then surfaces again in memory, up and down, up and down, like a needle, seaming together the fraying layers of the past and the present.”
Every story in Pixel is named after a part of the body, starting with The Hand’s Story and ending – appropriately enough – with The Buttocks’ Story. The body part that is referenced, always makes an appearance in the story to which it gives its name. Sometimes the allusion is dramatic and gory: in The Stomach’s Story a boy staggers on to a late night bus, clutching a wounded belly, high as a kite, blood and piss seeping from his trousers; also on the bus is a pregnant girl, and as she watches the boy writhing, her own belly stirs, with a first kick from her unborn child. Sometimes it is a marker of revenge: in The Hair’s Story, a man’s blonde lover spots his wife’s dark hair tangled in a brush in his glove compartment; she later wraps him a Christmas present, and leaves it in the same place – „the ribbon comes undone easily and from the red paper pours a heap of thick, golden hair, cut off in one go.” Throughout her writing, Tóth has an unflinching gaze. She is not afraid to confront the sordid and the violent, as well as the foolish and unfortunate side of human nature. These stories are not designed to lift you up and buoy you with confidence – far from it. But there is an honesty that refreshes. This is life, she says. Just accept it.
There are particular stories that linger in the memory, for their mastery of form, and emotional impact. The Neck’s Story is by far the most poignant in the whole volume. It details a casual moment in a fancy clothes store, shared between a mother and daughter, which sparks a memory of an affair in the older woman, and floods her with both sensual longing and with shame. A simple in-store scarf becomes the catalyst for her internal unravelling: and in such a small moment, a whole life is revealed. With a bolt of terrible retrospective shame, the woman wants to run from her daughter and from the shop she is in now, her memory tainted, her one moment of sexual freedom ruined forever. Her subsequent life, by association, is a kind of lie.
It is the subtler stories, like this one, in the collection, which really make Tóth stand out, as a humane and compassionate story teller. Nobody is exempt from these moments of fragility and defeat in life. We all want to deny or conceal them, but as Tóth insists again and again in her writing with a persistent and even steely certainty: nobody is immune from the everyday degradations and sadnesses of the human condition.
As always, the work of the translator is critical, in bringing Hungarian authors like Krisztina Tóth to a new, English speaking audience. Owen Good has done a particularly thorough and skilful job here, in his rendering of these complex and intricate stories. Sometimes, a translation can put a barrier between the reader and the text, flattening the energy and verve of the author’s original words. But here, the opposite is the case. Good’s nuanced and confident approach opens up Tóth’s stories , with a style that feels both fresh and modern throughout, whilst remaining ever attentive to the rhythms and idiosyncrasies of the author herself.
This review was written by Barney Bardsley for Hungarian Literarture Online
