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ARTISAN REVIEW
borderland between reflex, fable, and testimony, where I myself am not
certain what actually has happened or how. ... Sentences in a dancing,
zigzagging relation to one another, yet also independent."
The same can be said of the zigzagging relations of the characters that
emerge, for besides Kobra, the host of relatives and lovers that speak to
each other across the years represents a cross section of Hungarian society
and its history. There is the emigre Janos, who returns from a teaching
post in America to become the lover of Melinda. She is married to
Antal,
a filmmaker, who doesn't seem to mind the liason, and they
all
know
Zoltan, the former Marxist who commits suicide in England when he
feels that Hungary is becoming too Western. Meanwhile, Kobra in later
years has taken up with his daughter Regina, her mother Klara having
been his first cousin. Hence, incest would seem the norm of Kobra's
world, but it represents more a tool of survival than it does scandal.
Forced upon one another in the effort to stay alive through the hard years
as children in the Holocaust and then through the years of Soviet repres–
sion, the later years find all parties understanding what they have had to
endure and how they have helped each other endure it.
Yet, as Kobra states, "This is not a novelistic novel, because guests
keep arriving; there are more and more of us. So many, in fact, that not
everyone knows everyone else, and - behold - we experience in these
pages what we do in life: We don't know what will happen next." In this
Konrad is certainly consistent, for often it is difficult to even figure out
just which character is speaking, the narrative voice sometimes shifting
mid-chapter. The author does make clear that all of the voices in essence
belong to Kobra, for the conceit of the novel is that, as an older writer
looking back on his life while sitting at a stone table in his Budapest gar–
den to write this novel, Kobra is writing himself through others. "The
hero of the following story is born in these pages," he proclaims at the
start. "He is an extension of the author; he is, in fact, the author's night–
mare, drawing his life force from the author's blood."
Thus, it would seem that Konrad has also ignored Kafka's refusal to
write about literature. No sin in that, but in a novel that goes on to trace
the lives of Kobra, his friends and relatives, and how they survived both
the Holocaust and the Soviet machine, the danger is that such dire stories
can seem too much in service to the literary constructs fueling the novel.
Konrad manages to escape this for the most part, the passages on Kobn's
childhood and survival seeming the most grounded. But in being moved
by them, one wonders all the more about the need for the elaborate
house of mirrors that surrounds the more straightforward narration.
History, of course, must still seem a house of mirrors in which writers
such as Konrad continue to feel lost. Hence, the question asked by
Berberova's character at the start still remains , though in a quite different
