“The first daffodils arrive in a hostile world.” (162)
If Camus’s The Stranger had a baby with Melville’s Bartleby, you’d get Szalay’s Istvan. Unlike Bartleby, who prefers not to, Istvan’s response is “okay.” He goes through life letting things happen to him, around him, with him. The novel opens with a bang – a 42-year-old woman sexually assaults a fifteen-year-old. (Though it’s not how it is written, Istvan is a victim.) We’re not even 40 pages in before he’s fallen in love with her, there’s a titty fuck (something I never thought I’d see detailed in a Booker book), her husband’s dead and Istvan has been arrested.
What Szalay does with time is dizzying, thrusting the reader ahead without a road map and leaving it up to the reader to piece together when and where we are. “Fuck you. Figure it out,” is how it comes off. Honestly, that’s the best part of the novel – Szalay isn’t going to hold your hand.
Istvan is entirely unlikable, but he’s supposed to be. The novel is entirely from his POV. Until it isn’t. That’s where the novel fails. When Helen and Thomas get POVS, it gets sloppy and loses its punch. It’s clearly not unintentional, but the result diminishes what Szalay had been building.
Things worth mentioning:
How many cigarettes are smoked in this novel. It’s almost every page.
Tommy playing Horatio – the loyal friend and scholar – in a play that no one gives a damn about.
The fact a fox causes the accident – a nod to tricksters/shapeshifters?
Istvan collecting expensive watches – especially considering how Szalay thrusts us around without a timepiece.
The role seasons play when it comes to Istvan’s emotions, particularly fall.
Are the increased blank pages after the accident intentional or a publishing error/necessity? It showed the most emotion we’d gotten from Istvan, and the blank pages read like the emotions/moment were deleted. I can appreciate it for what it is and how it’s done, but it’s not my favorite.
A Girl Named Tommi 