In these autobiographical stories spanning the time from childhood to young adulthood, Pál Békés describes how the world is discovered and seized by the child. He advances towards punchlines with excellent anecdotal skills and economy. The greatest joy to read are the stories from early childhood, in which the naive child-narrator conveys a meaning he does not understand himself, for instance about the tunnel drilled through the middle of the Earth, or later about young pioneers collecting ballots. (Although only a single name appears on the ballot, even the invalids have to be visited, because the elections are general and secret.) The cruelty and the balance of powers are modified from age to age and reach into the adult society.

Unfortunately, monsters are impossible to overcome�but they can be kept at arm's length. Thus both children and adults will discover in this wonderful, unique piece of children�s literature. Our main character, Little Wood, has not yet been harassed by monsters. This inhabitant of the Hollow, a veritable bookworm, will not read from his books to his acquaintances; he has locked his door; he has given up reading and lives in fear. His name forgotten, and he is now called the �Fearing-Being�. Even his best friend, Csatang, has discovered that the world belongs to monsters, and it is best to join them. So far the Fearing-Being's library kept them away, but now they are approaching. The Fearing-Being gives in and goes to the Monster Admission Committee, where he passes the necessary trials, but in the end decides not to sign a statement of entry. When he learns that Csatang has burned his books, he gathers his courage and denounces his former friend as a traitor. He goes back to Little Wood, drives the monsters out and starts to tell the stories in his books from memory�he recalls them all! The world of Little Wood is saved, and there follows a miracle: the old oak jumps up from the ground. Békés raises tension by delaying the introduction of the protagonist. Here is a children�s book that is exciting, funny and filled with puns. It even includes a small monster-taxonomy!

This autobiography recounts the Békés’s experiences in the USA. In an easy tone and with deadpan humour, Békés relates his adventures (noting along the way the lack of epical credibility of an American story in Europe), while classifying the experiences of his first American journey in the 1980s and the changes he found in the 90s. In the second half of the book he describes many of the extraordinary people he met at the International Writers’ Program and sets some comic scenes (for instance, taking his temperature with a thermometer marked according to the Fahrenheit system, all the while being helped by a collection of people of different native languages, and this during a black-out).

332 pages

 

An author of short stories, novels and children's stories, Békés defines his volume as a "gang" novel (see below), though in truth the work is more a garland of short stories than a novel proper. Links are created between the individual "chapters" by repeated motifs and figures, with the main characters of one story becoming secondary figures in the next, and the adventures of several generations building on one another. The defining backdrop throughout is provided by the area of Budapest's Seventh District known locally as "Chicago"; a large housing estate near the Eastern Railway Terminal that was built during the massive economic boom of the end of the 19th century. Not only is the "Chicago" of the title ambiguous, but "gang" also has a double meaning in Hungarian, originally being a term of German origin which refers to the outside corridors (roughly "gangways") around an inner courtyard that are characteristic of older tenements and blocks of flats in Hungarian cities (a character called Goldie is known as "queen of the gangway", for example), but also, and of course more familiarly to English readers, denoting the mobs of Al Capone and his like. This is meant not purely in a metaphorical sense, as one of the heroes of the book, Frederick Shumin (brother of Vendel and lover of the latter's wife Goldie) is a man who, to escape the White Terror of the early 1920s that followed the collapse of Hungary's abortive Soviet Republic of 1919, temporarily fled to Chicago in the USA, where he was in contact with the world of criminal gangs. Among the strange figures that we encounter in the Budapest "Chicago" are a newspaper vendor with a mysterious past, a railwayman who was once condemned to die, market stall keepers, boozers and barflies, even a young Russian soldier who first saw Hungary only during the revolution of 1956, despite the fact that he has a Hungarian mother. Through the fates of these and other typical figures of Budapest life, we trace the history of Hungary over the last century, from the golden era of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, through the Second World War and the 1956 revolution, up to the Kádár era of the Seventies and Eighties.

 

"The individual pieces are always meticulously crafted and rounded off, not unlike the footwear of master leatherworker Vendel Shumin; a definition of the "gang" novel : an open-ended type of prose fiction, composed of small units with loose overlaps in motifs, which is, or can be, enriched ad lib by varied reprises."

                                                                       -Sándor Bazsányi, Élet és Irodalom

 

"His novel is a surrogate legendry."

                                                                       -Judit N. Kósa, Népszabadság

 

 

(No Worries: Old and Newer Stamps and Short Stories)

 

 

While reading Pál Békés’s short stories the reader may form an impression that this is just the place where one will come across that tweed-jacketed uncle who, year after year, gives one exactly the same present and yet, year after year, one is still thrilled to receive it.

            No Worries is a collection in which previously published short stories (which Békés refers to as stamps) are rounded out with newer ones. The structure that emerges resembles the skeleton of an autobiographical novel. Which, once the fate (or fatelessness) of grandparents and parents has been outlined, launches into the narrator’s life in 1956 (Békés was born in March of that year). The infant reacts to the fall of Hungary’s revolution at the end of that year with a silent revolution of his own: he buttons up completely, only to start bawling the moment the Soviet troops (which never left the country in the first place) regroup on the border to attack Budapest again. The family is unable to defect, so the boy grows up in what is then the Kádár era. The outdoors skating rink in City Park, school camps, the “Prague Spring” and happening to be in a Czechoslovak holiday camp when the Warsaw Pact forces invaded on 20 August 1968; vacation jobs in factories as a student; a contract to look after an elderly Jewish lady in return for which he will inherit her flat after she has died (a common arrangement in the Eighties); night shifts, telephone boxes and subways; a security cop in the café; a get-together with ex-classmates; and news of deaths. The stamps are in some cases fixed to some life event, at other times draw attention to some absurdity or other of the ways of the world or history.

The model for the shorter prose pieces is openly admitted to be the elliptical “one-minute stories” pioneered by István Örkény in the mid-Sixties. Békés also has the knack of being able to tell a story well and pithily; how to think in story terms. It is a style of writing characterized by the pragmatism and unpretentiousness of the Anglo-American prose literature of which he has shown himself to be a superb translator.

            The title chosen for the collection is a trenchant summary of the world picture of the stories: this or that may come at a bad time, one piece of bad luck may come after another, the situation is hopeless but not critical. Never mind the stamps. Never give up!