THE GREATEST EUROPEAN NOVELS

I was talking to Kurt Tens the other day. A large party had assembled in a small room, and there was, as Jean-Paul Sartre once put it, ‘No Exit’. Luckily I was crammed against a large plate of smoked-salmon hors d’oeuvre. It was something to behold; my lips almost leapt from my face in their enthusiasm. You should have seen it. And yet, for all the gifts that this sweet life of ours offers us, there is almost always a sting in the tail, a fly in the soup, a tiger in the bread bin. In this case, there were two. The first – and I’m still getting my head round this one – lay in the concept of ‘vegan salmon’ (What was it made of? My stomach and I will remain happily ignorant). The second, of course, was Kurt Tens, crammed in beside me and as keen as ever, perhaps even more than before, to ‘sound me out’ regarding the future of the Hungarian novel.

    ‘Vhot steet is contempoo-wary littrata in vhen za beest navel of the lost feeve yeahs conzits ov an orpen leeter to a pavvot?’ said he, in his curious I'm-a-Hungarian -who-learnt-to-speak-English-in-South-Africa accent.
 ‘Well, of course, who can say, really?’ answered I, in my equally curious I-profess-to-love-art-but-often-remain-indifferent-to-almost-everything-about-it manner.
    ‘Ze prooblem vith Zek, as I ze it…’

    And so on. I won’t press you with any more of this. It was a tedious conversation -  that’s all you need to know. As far as content goes, we’ve already heard all that we need to hear, though I admit that it may be worth repeating, for those unaccustomed to Tens’s eccentric speech patterns. So here, again, was his question: ‘What state is contemporary literature in when the best novel of the last five years consists of an open letter to a parrot?’ My original reply was, as you know, rather vague. I will now attempt to shine a little light into the shadows.


    First, context. What probably strikes the common reader most in this enquiry are its final five words – ‘open letter to a parrot’. I find it hard to understand anyone who doesn’t keep track of the ins and outs of the European literary scene, but if you’re amongst the sorry few who don’t, I can comprehend your confusion in the face of this comment. Open letter to a parrot. What can it mean? Clearly, it is a reference to one of the better known Hungarian novels of the last five or six years: Ivan Zech’s With Apologies to his Sister’s Parrot: possibly the only modern novel that I know which takes the form of, well, an open letter to a parrot.

    To return, briefly, to Kurt Tens. Based on the statement previously quoted, how easy is it to determine his estimation of Zech’s novel? At first glance the remark is suffused with negativity. Hungarian literature is going to the dogs. No, worse. It’s going to the parrots. And we all know that a parrot is more farcical than a dog. You only have to say the word to know that. Once you wind up your imagination, there’s no going back. Long-bearded pirates with cockney accents hove into view. Stubborn shopkeepers uttering increasingly archaic excuses join the parade. Before you know it, you’re surrounded by a cacophony of comic squawks. Oh dear me no. By saying ‘parrot’ (or pavvot) Tens is clearly out to demean Hungarian literature; to make it seem light, hackneyed, comical: very much (if you’ll excuse me) in the featherweight division. To give him his due, however, he does concede that Zech’s novel is still the best example of Hungarian fiction in the last half decade. This means that he is better than Josef Hiebchik and Sándor Zlölt. No mean feat in my book. But of course, Tens thinks nothing of these writers. They are the pits. They are lower than a flatworm doing the limbo. They are sub-parrot.

   
    So, we have established that the parrot is, essentially, a droll creature. Or at least (without reference to Ivan Zech) that’s the way we see it. Never mind the fact that katerina gluck (lack of capitals deliberate) has already proved that it could be utilised as a serious symbol (see her 1966 collection of odes, The Parrot of Waning Youth) or that novels as recent as Y Yippos, Why the Fig Leaves Fall have successfully employed fascist Toucans as major characters. For that’s the truth of it: things like a ‘open letter to a parrot’ have been flying around European literature for a while now. And is it any the worse off for it? Have we descended into farce? I can’t say no. But what I can say its that the most farcical novels I have read in recent times are not those with parrots in them. A silly title doth not make a silly book - and vice versa. There are many ideas that sound much more sensible than an open letter to a parrot, granted, but few novels that contain more sense yhan Zech's. Haven’t we learnt anything? We need look no further than Yoy Ijit’s My Grandmother’s Pudding for a precedent. A novel written from the perspective of a cherry crumble? Sounds like a ludicrous concept. But don’t tell me it doesn’t work. The proof, as they say, is in the pudding.


    A white rabbit of thought scoots into the burrow of my brain, as Georgy Riecke might say. Here’s a question: What possible reason might Kurt Tens have for disparaging the work of Ivan Zech, other than disdain for parrot-orientated literature? I remember once reading an article on Jon Gvennersson’s infamous television series; the one claiming to cover neglected European novelists (Write On! was the name of it: the series, not the article). No one has yet written such a scathing review of Kurt Tens’ own efforts in this area, but one doesn't need a crystal ball to foresee them doing so. Sure, he isn’t quite as idiotic as Gvennersson (who is?) but what he lacks in stupidity he makes up for in petty jealousy, pointless grudge-holding and a remarkable facility for misreading character. Fortunately, television networks only allow him onto their screens for fifteen-minute bursts. One can only imagine, with a fearful shudder, what crimes he would commit if given a full hour. As it happens, fifteen minutes suits him well enough: there is thankfully little time for him to get talking; something which, my dinner party experience tells me, he thinks he excels at. Having said that, I can't say I’ve ever seen him get through the whole nine hundred seconds without making at least four fatuous remarks.

    Gvennersson, as noted, is eternally driven wayward by the absence of his brain (if seen please return, care of the Icelandic Broadcasting Corporation) whilst Tens, who can be perceptive under pressure, is thrown off course by a refusal to see past paltry problems. Example: allowing his failure to secure an interview with Ivan Zech to blind him to the significance of With Apologies to his Sister’s Parrot (the subject of this review, in case you've forgotten). Zech’s absence did, admittedly, undermine the title of the series (Kurt Tens Interviews the Best Contemporary Novelists) but Tens should have more grace than to let his rancour against the writer fester like this. After all, it's relatively common knowledge that Ivan Zech never allows interviews, whether they be for newspapers, television or none of the above. Even I’ve been turned down - and you won’t see me crying about it (no one ever does: I cry in the dark. But that’s another matter). One has to learn to respect an artist’s wishes: they are not public servants in the normal sense of the world: they, more than anything or anyone, need to be left alone when required.


    A further word or two on Zech’s reluctance to give interviews may be needed at this juncture, as it has made more than one man unhappy. His usual explanation (‘I haven‘t enough time') has both aggravated and pleased critics. Some think it a pathetic excuse: Zech has just as much time as everyone else. Back in 1997 he admitted that he ‘never spent more than two hours a day writing’. Ha! Got you! This hermit-like behaviour is just a pose: he’s frightened of answering questions about his work, because he knows he doesn’t have any. On the contrary, cry the other side: there’s no good reason why Zech should submit to interviews. Everything you need to know about him is written in his novels. He clearly needs his space. To this otherwise diverting debate I must add a fact which has hitherto been ignored. It has always been supposed, goodness knows why, that Zech is only a novelist. When he said that he spent a mere two hours a day writing, it was thought that he spent the other twenty-two cutting his toe-nails, or watching re-runs of Swedish reality TV (like the best of us). In fact, Zech has a job.

    It isn’t strange, no, it isn’t strange at all. Lots of novelists have ‘outside’ jobs. How could they not? We don’t call these European novelists ‘neglected’ just for the fun of it. Oh, we all like to think that they live like tramps in garrets, chewing stale bread for breakfast, lunch and supper and sending their latest work to their agent scrawled on the back of a leaf. We like to think that they’d rather starve than take a telemarketing job. But let’s be practical for half a minute. Is it really fair to expect all our writers to be quite so dedicated? Might they not benefit from living a more regular life? Can we really begrudge Ivan Zech for taking these much-needed breaks from the aesthetic adventure that is writing fiction?

    The half minute is up, so let’s get back to the facts. A recent review has explored the hatred of the writer Solos Seeep. He, you may recall, is disliked primarily because of his appearance: because he looks like the love child of a slug and a walrus, with a touch of Count Dracula thrown in for good measure. Fair enough: I will not spring to Seeep’s defence - I’ll leave that to the semi-professionals. Let's turn to Ivan Zech instead. Now, Zech has never faced such hatred, but he is disliked by many; not for what he looks like, but because no one actually knows what he looks like. Worse than that, they know - or think - they should, but still they can’t. He has revealed, after all, that he is employed in a job that, in his words, ‘keeps him in the public eye’. He is not a recluse, he insists. He has never been in hiding. It’s just that no one really knows who he is. Family and friends, yes, but they're well in on the secret. The rest of us are still in the dark.


    Watch me step out of the dusky shadow. No, I don’t know what Ivan Zech looks like, but I don’t much care either (always a good exit strategy). I admit that he could be anywhere. There have long been rumours that he is a postman; others think he is a taxi-driver; still more a social worker. Indeed, the last one, or even two, might go some way to explaining his fiction. Then again, if every author of a dysfunctional family novel worked part-time as a social worker, European social services would be, if not in good health, very well staffed. Who knows... Perhaps he plays in goal for Budapest reserves. Perhaps he mans security cameras. The more you think about it, the potentiality of many jobs for a creative writer is high. Call it paid research. (Having said that, twelve years on, the world still awaits my searing exposé of the pizza delivery business. You should see the notes I made on the back of the used boxes... Oh, it’d a classic, to top all others - before being deep-panned by the critics, that is).

    But to use a line from Zech’s novel: "Why, my dear parrot, does it always end up being about me?" I’ll deal with the parrot in a minute. First a word that appeared mid-way through the previous paragraph. ‘Dysfunctional’. Oh dear me yes, dysfunctional. Put it next to ‘family’ and you’ve got something even more horrific. How many times have we heard talk of a ‘dysfunctional family’? I shudder every time I commit those words to paper. How is it that a near tautology has become an accepted phrase? The words of K P Gringen ring around my head. ‘Show me a family that functions properly and I will show you a pigeon that sight-reads Chopin’. One could, of course, wrestle with his idea. If everyone is dysfunctional, what is functional? It’s like saying that wanting to be different is the best way to becoming normal.  It’s like... well, it’s like a lot of things. But you get the point. You, me and Kurt Tens have witnessed the ‘dysfunctional family’ thing enough times. Oh look: a drunken father. His sister takes drugs: well blow me down. Only his brother seems normal enough... oh no, wait: he’s the brooding silent type, bound to crack any minute. Ah yes, there he goes, cycling across the schoolyard in his grandmother’s wedding dress. Did I miss someone out? His mother, of course, died young, in so-tragic-it’s-almost-funny circumstances. I can’t remember what it was exactly, but there was definitely a goose involved. They’re messed up, but on the whole they get by, in their own eccentric manner. It’s wretched, it’s touching: it’s a formula that works well - aggravatingly well.


    Time, at last, for the parrot. Is it this, maybe, that sets Ivan Zech’s ‘dysfunctional family’ novel apart from the rest? Not exactly; we’ve also his style to thank for that: the effortless grace with which he drops sentences on the paper, like a France's finest patisserier icing miniature white roses onto the Prince of Monaco’s birthday cake (if you can imagine such a thing). If there are lapses (and there are) I blame them on the translation - courtesy of Pietro Mangnesi, whose habit is always to err on the side of caution when it comes to foreign colloquialisms, leading him into needlessly formal cul-de-sacs. Nevertheless, Zech’s innately stylish technique can never be entirely scrubbed away, with its wilfully casual, charmingly earnest tone, which runs from the very first sentence to the last. Here, for your pleasure, is an excerpt from the second paragraph:



    As is clear from this excerpt - and from copious comments made over the course of this review - With Apologies to his Sister’s Parrot takes the form of an open letter to a parrot. You should know this by now. If you don't, stick a stamp on your forgetful forehead and post yourself to Alaska. The letter is from the narrator, a cardboard stand-in for the author one suppose, who has left his home and family behind for a new life in an un-named country (which I suspect to be the Czech Republic, though it could be Poland). Rather than write a letter to a family member explaining his decision, however, he has chosen to write a series of long, engagingly dilatory missives to the family parrot. At first this seems like a pointlessly kooky enterprise. As it turns out, the parrot’s role in the narrator’s story is much more interesting than we would have thought.


    If novels about ‘dysfunctional families’ have missed anything (and on the whole I’d say they’d got most things covered) it might be said to be a satisfactory exploration (and by exploration I mean more than just mentioning it) of the role of the family pet. Before Zech came alone, we had to turn to the psychologists for the best work on the subject. Not that the psycologists haven't done it justice, for they certainly have. Leading the way, of course, is Dr C. Vhu, with his pioneering paper, ‘The Place of the Pet in the Fractured Family’ which I recommend to anyone, save those who get sentimental about the plight of three-legged poodles. For those who prefer a more ‘popular’ approach, I heartily advocate the work of Dr Deneeta Khan, whose short study ‘Save your Divorce by Buying a Dog’ picks up on ideas probed in her 1972 essay ‘Cat as Conduit’ to new levels, with plenty of light laughs along the way.

    Otherwise, stick to Ivan Zech, who does the job as well as I’ve seen within the fictional template. With Apologies to his Sister’s Parrot is, in some senses, your regular family epic, spanning four generations, but Zech really does have a keen eye for those elements of the story that others would easily overlook. Indeed, his eye is rarely diverted from such elements: his tale is a tale we’ve heard many times before, but decentred. With half an eye on his own family history, the narrator of his novel spends most of the time uncovering the family history of the family pet: our friend the parrot. And what a history it is: parrots, it turns out, have been a part of this family for many generations, though no one knows why exactly. What’s more, parrots are more than your average household pet. They can speak ...sort of. To be honest, most parrots that I've met haven’t exactly been on the loquacious side and, in fact, the most talkative one I ever met had a vocabulary that ran to two words only, neither of which I should like to repeat. Still, Zech’s parrots are a little better than this. They don’t hold forth like Greek philosophers, but they retain the odd phrase or two, phrases which, in their way, represent intriguing summaries of the type of company they have kept

    To say anymore would be letting you too far into a story you shall have to discover for yourself. I am no parrot - and I have no desire to repeat everyone that Ivan Zech has written. Of course, you may have already decided that this isn’t the book for you. You’ve had your fill, perhaps, of ‘dysfunctional families’. If you’re like almost everyone in the world, you’re probably in one - the last thing you want to do is step into another one. You assume a Kurt Tens-like stance (though not, I trust, physique). An open letter to a parrot - is that really what we’re talking about here? It doesn’t sound good enough. We all know what parrots are fit for. They’re feathery comedy fodder, that’s all.

    I don’t like to insist, but trust me on this one. I said trust me. Read the passage describing the first parrot to have entered the narrator’s family and tell me whether that is or isn’t a remarkably sensitive piece of writing. The button collecting great-grandmother - what a character she is! Quirky, yes, but the kind of quirkiness that isn’t shoved down your throat, but delicately positioned on your tongue. As for the great-grandfather and his parrot-buying motives, there’s nothing there that Dr C. Vhu wouldn’t nod his gnarled old head to. The parrots are never a fanciful adjunct: they are central to the story: they are the story. Admittedly, the idea of addressing a letter to one is, in its way, fanciful. But not, I think, thoughtless.

    To end where I began. Not with Kurt Tens, per se, but with his somewhat insolent question. What state is contemporary literature in when the best novel of the last five years consists of an open letter to a parrot? I will shake off my prior vagueness and carve out on the rock of literary criticism a strident, unequivocal answer. A pretty good state, I’d say. A pretty good state.