George Konrád Archives - A Geography of Reading

Reading in the Aftermath of the Kavanaugh Confirmation

October 15, 2018 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

Depression robs me of feeling and enjoyment. It can also be a strong wake-up call to get back in touch with the things I value quick quick. Listening to the Kavanaugh hearings and all the blather afterwards I felt all the emotions—from the hope that a woman’s voice would be heard against the establishment to the devastation of having my worst expectations confirmed. I tried in those first few days to engage with my family and to touch the thing that always brings me back to myself—books—instead I found myself changed. I don’t know yet if for the better or the worse, or even if this change is permanent, but it’s big enough to explore, here, with you.

Silencing the Cacophony of Mansplaining

The first thing I noticed about how my reading was changing was that I suddenly wanted to throw A Feast in the Garden by George (Gyorgy) Konrád against the wall. I’ve had this reaction before when reading Roberto Bolaño—I loathed his narrator’s didacticism and the way it put me directly in touch with the (male) narrator’s thoughts about the story while distancing me completely from the (female) protagonist’s actual experience. Yes, this could have been done for effect, blah blah blah, but as a woman in this society I’ve had my fill of men explicating something I could or have experienced. I actually loathe the phrase “mansplaining,” but even more so I loathe the male voices that seem to find their only personal fulfillment in explaining—especially when they’re explaining my own experience (or something I know more about than they do) to me. This is not all men, but it’s too many. And I think it’s part of my on-again, off-again beef with Hemingway. Something I did not realize until this week.

So for one moment I feared I was off male narrators forever. Thankfully, Konrád is a brilliant artist and I came to see the effect of what he was doing in this book (which I am still reading, slowly, as his writing demands and deserves). I do, however, feel a lot more comfortable chucking narrators who don’t earn their keep right out my damned window…

Do I sound angry? I am. And embracing my actual feelings instead of trying to make them palatable was something that led me to this next book…

Getting Intimate with Women’s Darkness with Toddler-Hunting & Other Stories

I felt a little dumb when Toddler-Hunting & Other Stories arrived and I realized it was not by Yōko Ogawa (whose dark short stories in Revenge I adored) but instead by Kōno Taeko, a completely different female Japanese author who is also not afraid of taking readers to dark places. But Toddler-Hunting & Other Stories was fantastic, so much so that I wish I could give proper credit to whomever recommended it to me.

What made this the exactly right book for me exactly right now is that listening to Dr. Ford’s honest, gentle, people pleasing ways in that hearing I honestly believed someone might hear her. But that too-common female approach to power got bowled the fuck over and I needed to experience a completely different approach to female power. Do Kōno’s protagonists feel even a little bit guilty about how damned bad they are as they do things like stalk other women’s children? Maybe. They don’t feel at all bad about asking for whatever they want in bed, though, and I loved them for that (even though I wish at least one was the dominant rather than the submissive in the recurring BDSM scenes in this book). I loved being inside the experience of women who felt real to me in their myriadness.

By far my favorite story in this collection is “Snow,” a tale whose psychological underpinnings are so on point I gasped and felt physical pain when I figured out what was going on. It delved deep and unashamedly into the ugly that can be relationships between women—something I fear will prevent the kind of voting backlash I hope for in November. Toddler-Hunting & Other Stories is fantastic. Read it.

Embracing Allegory in Playthings

I’m not going to presume that Alex Pheby’s Playthings is a tightly scripted allegory of our present day (partially because it was originally published in 2015 and also because it’s actually about one of the most famous cases of paranoid schizophrenia in history), but let’s pretend for a moment it is. At first I was not sure that I could delve deeply into Schreber’s all-consuming self-centeredness (for example, he so completely can’t deal with the fact that his wife has a stroke that the action in that scene then has to completely center around him), but I went with it long enough to get immersed in this superb example of what it feels like to be gaslit by everyone around you. Pheby does a wonderful job of draining the life (at least from Schreber’s point of view) from all the characters around the protagonist and of portraying this man’s madness. I guess that’s the secret sauce of gaslighting, isn’t it? We all have some secret weakness that can be turned against us and drive us to madness. The fact that Schreber is in fact mad makes it just that much easier.

The old-timey feel of this book belies its modern effectiveness. I loved the way Pheby played with chapter introductions—using the length of 18th century-like chapter titles and the feeling of interludes—to transition us through this strange story. The historical setting also contributes to this effect. I was glad we never quite get Schreber’s diagnosis because experiencing the symptoms (and getting to wonder how much the people around him were exacerbating them) was much more powerful than having a concrete, rote, dead name applied to that experience (maybe because I don’t like things being explained to me). Telling myself that this book was an allegory made getting through the day a lot easier and I was enthralled enough by the middle of Playthings that I stopped taking notes. That’s a good sign. Check it out if you want a fictional look at what it feels like to feel completely insane.

I have not recovered from the depression or the related dashing of my hopeful illusions (over and over and over), but I’m no longer letting the current political crazytown keep me from my favorite coping mechanism, either. What are you reading to put light in these dark days?

If you need a good literary escape, pick up a copy of A Feast in the Garden, Toddler-Hunting & Other Stories, Revenge, or Playthings from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Books that Don’t Make the Cut

January 16, 2016 by Isla McKetta, MFA 2 Comments

If you’ve read more than a few of my reviews, you’ll notice that I usually only take the time to review books I like. That’s because I prefer to delve into the positive aspects of a work but also because my time is valuable and I often don’t finish books I’m not enjoying. At the beginning of this month I went back to work after maternity leave and time is now more precious than ever—evidenced by the fact that I tossed aside book after book in my first week back. This is the story of the books I didn’t finish and why.

Parallel Stories by Peter Nadas

This was actually the second time I tried to read this book. I took it on a week-long beach getaway for my husband’s and my first anniversary. Then it sat on my bedside table for a couple of years and I managed to read 100 pages before tucking it away. So when I knew I’d be home for a prolonged maternity leave, I dug it out again. I knew from reading Love and A Book of Memories that his work is often gorgeously slow but worth the effort.

Parallel Stories started out strong. A body is found on a bench and the first scene is a delicate and thoughtful interplay between an investigator and the man who either found the body or murdered the man. Nadas reveals so much of the men’s psychology as the scene unfolds and we come to learn that the investigator does suspect the man but that he actually doesn’t care. It’s very soon after the Berlin Wall came down and there is so much more going on in all of their lives. The scene is surprising and riveting.

If only the rest of the book was that way. Instead, Nadas starts following the story of a family in Hungary. We only really ever see two characters at a time in conversation and I came to understand that the juxtaposition of odd bits of these characters’ natures was the source of the title. I also stumbled on the most extensive and dull scenes of masturbation I’ve ever read. I kept trying to push farther into the book to see if we could get back to the mystery or if there was anyone I could care about in the book, but, well… eventually my poor brain was as chafed as the character’s genitals and I had to stop reading. At least I got over 200 pages into this 1100+ page tome.

Flaubert’s Parrot by Julian Barnes

I picked this book up at the local Little Free Library because I’ve enjoyed many of Julian Barnes’s novels. I thought it would be a quiet, meditative, well-written novel that would reach into my subconscious and teach me things about writing. I did not think it would be about Flaubert’s parrot. Literally. Well, actually, two parrots (because only one could have really been Flaubert’s), stuffed.

The book is filled with all kinds of biographical details about Flaubert’s life, which is great if you’re a Flaubert scholar or subscribe to the school of thought that the life of the writer is equally interesting to the work. I don’t. I did read the collected correspondence of Gustave Flaubert and George Sand because I adore the art of correspondence, and after that I knew more than enough about their lives.

It’s possible that this book contains a mystery or a brilliant narrative or some brilliant writing. I’ll never know because 60 pages were plenty to turn me off.

The Loser by George Konrad

Konrad is one of those obscure Eastern European writers I read in grad school. And loved. I read The Case Worker, a squirrely novel about a case worker in Communist Hungary. That one was hard to read but worth the effort. The Loser was just weird.

The book starts out in an outlandish nightmare then transitions to a mental asylum and then the countryside of Communist Hungary and then the asylum again. I think. The type was so small and the writing so dense that I only ever got between two and five pages read per night. So where I could have been immersed in a gorgeous metaphor that revealed what life really felt like in Communist Hungary, instead I felt like I was in a nightmare. Kind of like the time we watched a Japanese horror film in a drafty theater at midnight. This early bird kept falling asleep and waking again as the characters descended into a neon-lit Buddhist hell. I was freezing nd had no idea what was happening. All I wanted—during the movie and in this book—was to GET OUT. I think I completed a whole 40 pages.

Did I give these books their fair shake? Probably not. Am I too tired in these first couple of weeks as a working mother to really engage with literature? Maybe. Do I sound a little cranky? Yes. Sorry about that. I love books. I sincerely believe there are great books that will just never quite hit me right. These might be among them. But I’ll never know. If you want to find out for yourself whether I’ve just maligned some of the best books in the universe, check out the Little Free Library on 12th Ave NE and around 90th in Seattle later today 🙂

Thanks for bearing with me as I figure out this whole mom/worker/writer thing. I’m going to try to find something I enjoy and get a new review out to you soon. Just as soon as the kiddo and I finish another round of Dr. Seuss’s Mr. Brown Can Moo Can You? which he ADORES. And if he had his way, he’d grab this laptop right out of my hands and type up a review right quick. Or put it in his mouth. Judging by the way he “consumes” his favorite books, I’m not going to find out.

Empathy in Konrad’s The Case Worker

April 22, 2012 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

From the day to day routine to the understanding of the masses, George Konrád evokes what it must be like to be a social worker in The Case Worker. From the very first words of the book, “Go on, I say to my client. Out of habit, because I can guess what he’s going to say, and doubt its truthfulness,” Konrád is showing how routine the case worker’s job is and how it has inured him from caring about his clients. Konrád divided the first chapter into a series of short sections describing an interaction with a client, the makeup of the office, another client, more description of the building. By interspersing the narrator’s client relationships with information about floorplans and the objects stored in filing cabinets, Konrád makes the individual clients seem like tasks the narrator has to deal with during his workday and illustrates the narrator’s lack of engagement with his clients. The sections about objects are longer than the sections about clients, too, as though the whip with three lashes stored in the file cabinet is more interesting than the clients themselves. This feeling continues at the beginning of the chapter entitled “Suicide Cases” as the narrator summarizes case study after case study in short paragraphs that run into one another. The sentences about these clients are short, declarative, and devoid of emotion, for example: “In 1951 thirteen-year-old Klara G’s father was denounced as a war criminal and hanged.”

The Bandula Family

In the same chapter Konrád devotes nearly fourteen pages to the story of the Bandula family. This longest section of the book so far (with comparatively long paragraphs that go on for a page or more) both conveys a much deeper understanding of these clients and also brings the reader’s attention to the importance of this case. These are individuals not just suicide cases. I could be more aware of where I direct the reader’s attention in my own writing.

When the case worker takes on responsibility for the orphaned child of Bandula, he begins to take on the characteristics of his clients, but Konrád shows this “metamorphosis” rather than telling the reader about it. He begins with one of the more benign conditions, a compulsion for order. In the chaos of the Bandula apartment, the case worker devotes enormous amounts of time to putting and keeping the place in order. Konrád writes, “there’s no limit to my passion for tidiness….One of my clients went mad because his wife was absent-minded and things were always changing place in the apartment….I can well understand his distaste for the wanderings of salt cellars…” This is the beginning of empathy. A few pages before the case worker was describing the child as “this abstract object.” First he empathizes with the other client, then with Bandula, and eventually with the child. What’s interesting is how Konrád blends the official mind of the case worker with this newly empathetic creature when he begins to see the similarities between his position and Bandulas: “All in all, I am forced to conclude that there is not much difference between this kind of training and what I did before….In my official capacity I made decisions in writing, now I administer beatings.”

Playing with Form

But this is no ordinary case worker. Sometimes Konrád deviates from the standard form of paragraphing. For example, when the case worker is first taken to the mental hospital, Konrád renders a two page chapter that is all one sentence but a series of paragraphs that look as though they mated with stanzas. It’s not whimsical, but it is lyrical and given that these types of sections occur at various times throughout the book, the reader can see that the case worker’s mind (because the book is told in first person) is not as rigid and conventional as he would like to believe. The pattern is to have long descriptive stanzas and then a series of one-line stanzas. This punctuates the one-line stanzas and makes them stand out as though they were very short sentences among very long ones, except that these are all a part of one whole. So lines like: “reserved for male mental cases/of this security ward” come off as emphatic. Near the beginning of the novel is a similar section where instead of stanza-like paragraphs, Konrád joins a series of paragraphs with ellipses to make one sentence and it is dreamlike although the facts themselves are mundane. I like to play with sentence length for emphasis but I had never even considered breaking outside of standard paragraph form.

If this review made you want to read the book, pick up a copy of The Case Worker from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.