László Garaczi started as a poet; this is his first book of short prose. His method of writing was best summarised by himself in an interview: �During the process of writing I often revise the text, measure the words slowly and precisely, but when I finish and publish it, I never touch it again. ... Superfluities must be cut out, however painful this may be. I find some masochistic pleasure in killing off my own lines. If I think the text is as dense as possible, I begin to mould it into precision.�

            The title of the volume can have many meanings: one is plastic as material, or plastic as drug, the other is a pack of Hungarian cards (the parts of the text can be considered different cards), or even the plastic bomb of terrorists.

    A collection of texts, which for lack of a better name may be called short stories, which are termed by the author �bitter and disillusioned� but which are seen by both readers and critics alike as humorous. They mingle childhood memories with events from the present; real and surreal visions are mixed, mythical structures are imitated and parodied. The book has a similar effect on the reader as a colourful �trip�. The writing usually takes up a thread, some kind of a trail or scent (an emotional thread), and follows it while describing many unconnected motives and incidents, and at the end reaches something�many times the starting point itself. The subjective camera means that the viewpoint of the texts changes continually, sometimes creating an uncertain, even volatile atmosphere, sometimes an intimate and homey one, in accordance with the acts of the person whose viewpoint we follow.

 

    László Garaczi�s autobiographical series, Mintha élnél (As If You Were Alive, 1996) and Pompásan buszozunk (The Splendid Bus Ride) tells the story of a boy growing up in 1960s socialist Hungary. The title of the first, Lemur, Who Are You? refers to a line from James Joyce�s novel Ulysses. The second volume is somewhat better organised, having a more unified plot. This high-spirited young boy is becoming socialised at the end of 1960s, at the time of the ideological, physical and spiritual decline of the �golden age� of socialism. Garaczi�s post-modern playfulness, bliss and �radical cheerfulness� (as a critic observes) are all at their very best. He conjures up a unique world with all its paraphernalia: the words, expressions, forms and regulations that have become increasingly difficult to recall. However, a gesture, some now outdated jargon, or the name of a clumsy plastic object can immediately create a sense of community among members of the same generation. Garaczi is having great fun, sorting through this vast store-house of memories. The description of an awkward afternoon recalls thousands of others, and the irony is further increased by the employment of various frames of time. Garaczi reconstructs linguistic worlds; this is one of the most dominant features of his book.

This short novel is the fourteenth volume to be published by László Garaczi, adding to his previous output of short stories, novels, plays and feuilletons. Unlike two earlier short novels, Mintha élnél (As If, 1995) and Pompásan buszozunk! (The Splendid Bus Ride, 1998), English translations of both by the author's wife, Ildikó Noémi Nagy, were published in Hungary in 2002 in a single volume entitled Lemur Who Are You? That book took the form of autobiographical pieces, while this latest work is very definitely non-autobiographical. It is precisely by the attempt to distance himself from the Ego that Garaczi seeks to represent the way in which consciousness operates. The main protagonist is a person who, as a result of an incident that is never fully explained (possibly a suicide attempt), has been admitted to a psychiatric home and, on his female doctor's advice, is writing his memoirs. Though it mimics a rambling, incoherent, tormented memory, the text is nevertheless, paradoxically, extraordinarily organised, well-balanced and disciplined. The main protagonist (who in the third chapter, again on Dr Hirsch's advice, bestows the name of Felix on himself) is torn between two women and driven by his own artistic vision (he is the viola player in a string quartet) and unable to find a solid footing for himself in the world. His strange story, from a booze-up in Farkasrét to jumping into the Danube from the Elizabeth Bridge, unfolds in fragmentary splurges of dense, highly intricate narrative, interspersed with a multitude of vignettes, scenes, allusions and motifs that form one great monologue which is a sensitive register of the ebb and flow of the conscious mind. The novel is a single sentence, and the text, written throughout in lowercase letters, has been arranged by the writer into four chapters (ME, YOU, SHE, X) with no full stop at the end of the sentence - the novel, that is to say. These formal devices reinforce the feeling that here we really do have someone who is writing for his own benefit, not for others, and who wishes to pull out from himself and set down his own inner world. In imitating that process, an autonomous linguistic world is constructed that is full of irony, humour and playful elements, with brilliant miniature sketches that track the vibrations of the soul.

 

 

"The greatest merit of Garaczi's novel is to be discerned in the crude and impish uninhibitedness of its linguistic gestures, or in other words, its extreme assertion of linguistic ornamentation and the boundless freedom with which linguistic statements are arrayed alongside one another."

                                                           -István Margócsy, Élet és Irodalom

 

"MetaXa is not just an outstanding work of Garaczi's personal oeuvre but of contemporary Hungarian fiction."

                                                           -Béla Bodor, litera.hu