Review by Michael Stein for Transitions

Pixel

by Krisztina Toth

Translated from the Hungarian by Owen Good

Published by Seagull Books, 2019, 240 pages

Review by Michael Stein for Transitions

The premise in the title of Krisztina Toth’s interlinked book of short stories, Pixel, is of a work that when looked at up close reveals the tiny, practically unidentifiable pieces that make up our world, but when seen from a broader perspective discloses a more comprehensive image. Each of the stories is named for a different part of the human body, with that body part coming into play one way or the other thematically or in the plot itself. All the stories either take place in Hungary or have some connection to the country or its inhabitants.

And in case the title isn’t clear enough one of the very last stories (“The Knee’s Story”) is about a work of art consisting of a series of photographs that make up a body, almost like the book, and that from close up „all you can see are pixels, dried-out teabags, but from further they blur into a single body.” Then she notes that from a bird’s-eye view, „say if there was a God,” another perspective would reveal itself, showing the writing on the figure’s skin.

While the art metaphor may be a bit too direct in its symbolism it serves as a clear statement of Toth’s intentions. Luckily, the book is far more interesting than these designs. By writing a series of linked stories with recurring characters Toth has written something very like a novel but with all the genre’s mechanisms of showing the interconnections between characters stripped away. She also occasionally draws both the narrator’s and writer’s role starkly out of the background. The effect at times is like a magician performing a card trick. She will provide the briefest glimpse of a character, saying they will reappear in a later story as if predicting the card you randomly chose will be the one you inevitably pull out of the deck.

The more you read the more you anticipate Toth’s sleights of hand, so that if a daughter with an apartment on Baross Street is mentioned in one story then just wait a few body parts and she will undoubtedly return with a story of her own. Then there are all the details, the silver necklace, the haunted apartment on Terez Boulevard, that turn out to be significant in different times for different people. It is like a detective novel without a murder to figure out because the case you need to solve is the messy affair known as life. That there are murders as well is just a sign of the range of life the book takes in, from seaside holidays to refugees to teen romance to the Holocaust.

In the story „Tooth” Toth seems to call the very basis of the connections the book is founded on into question. A man is recounting getting the news his mother died. He is at a spa with his kids. They’re swimming and as he listens on the phone he looks at a locker and wonders if there’s any significance to the locker number:

„… we of course know it didn’t. It’s always like this. At such times people are susceptible to numerology, they search for connections, they ask themselves what would have happened if they had stayed at home. Nothing.”

This reflection though proves to be more narrative sleight of hand than any insight into connection itself, for we learn that if he hadn’t taken his kids swimming he would have met his lover, his lover being the daughter on Baross Street who wears a silver necklace whose purchase we read about in another story. So, over the question of the significance of connections are overlaid more connections, like a fog.

There’s something to be said for an avoidance of sentimentality in fiction, for not falling into the trap of    writing unearned emotion. Toth succeeds admirably in this, though perhaps she has succeeded a little too well. What is more difficult, particularly in the fragmented form she has adopted, is creating earned emotion. We are reading about characters in short flashes, often unnamed, partially or fully anonymous, and while this has many advantages for the flow and overall effect of the book it also has drawbacks.

It is a bit like meeting people for a few days on a trip and then running into them again years later. What are they to you? Neither friends nor acquaintances exactly. You are curious about them, happy to see them, catch up, but can these brief encounters add up to a real connection?

In the case of Pixel there was a point where I found myself turning back to confirm if the philandering husband from „The Neck’s Story” was the divorced philanderer from „The Eye’s Story,” but then it reached a certain point where I stopped checking, realized I would need to create a chart and that truthfully, I didn’t care enough. Most of these characters were not worth the effort. Most of the characters are linked by loveless marriages, passionless affairs, mostly cold family relations. It’s true that many connections in our alienated world are similarly cold and disappointing, but not this many.

The book is strongest and shows the greatest potential of its disconnected form in the powerful, polyphonic „The Gum’s Story.” Ano, sole survivor of her family from Treblinka, has seen that her family’s pre-war apartment on Terez Boulevard in Budapest is for sale and can’t resist going to see it. She excitedly calls her grandson Gergo, who is busy entertaining guests in the rural wine cellar where he works. He’s out of Budapest, distracted, but may as well be a million miles away for how little he cares. The story alternates fluidly between the two generations’ wildly varying points of view on their painful legacy, adding the landlord, who assumes he is showing the flat to prospective tenants. When the landlord offhandedly mentions how the apartment might have been owned by Jews, a further darker window into Hungary’s legacy is opened.