Falevelek szÃ(c)lben (Ãsatás I) by György Konrád

Chris Arthur Reading Life Mobile, Alabama. Negative Capability Press. 2017. 202 pages. Chris Arthur knows what an essay is: an attempt to reach a further, transcendent understanding through writing. Chris Arthur’s 2017 collection of essays, Reading Life, keeps an eye to the particular while exploring perennial questions—on the one hand, his daughter’s feet, the contents of a bookshelf, words themselves; and on the other, our human condition, the violence of his Northern Ireland homeland during the Troubles, and the vastness of time itself. In his essay “Priests (Reading fishing and desecration),” Arthur connects his early experiences growing up near Belfast during the rising and deadly sectarian /nationalist violence to the way that the word priest has evolved for him in the years since. Originally it was a word steeped in mystery and suspicion, and while most of that was stripped away by his experiences at university, Arthur admits to some lingering apprehension. Turning over his experiences in language leads him to a “general truth.” Arthur writes, “Words can continue to carry illicit cargoes long after we’ve ceased to be complicit in their smuggling.” These essays often take a simple object and invest it with significance, such as the way a mechanical mile-counter mounted to a youth’s bicycle stands in for the clickclick -click of our own mortality. Arthur suspects the indirect, analogical nature of the essay collection is met with discomfort by readers more familiar with fiction. His closing essay “Afterword (Reading essays)” offers both a justification for the form and some useful teaching in how to read the genre. Though essay collections rarely outshine crime novels, biographies, or histories on the best-seller lists, readers who come across a collection such as Chris Arthur’s Reading Life know its value. Such a reader will probably know of the essay’s origin as I did, and so it was with bemused pleasure that I thumbed open Reading Life for the first time to find, right under my fingers, a quote from Montaigne’s “On Solitude.” These words from centuries ago, and Arthur’s reflection on them, came to me just when most needed. I expect this book would offer such moments to anyone. Greg Brown Mercyhurst University György Konrád Falevelek szélben (Ásatás I) Budapest. Magvető. 2017. 500 pages. Although it is advertised as “the first part of György Konrád’s roman-fleuve” (regényfolyam ), Falevelek szélben (Ásatás I) (Leaves in the Wind [Excavation I]) is not really a novel. Its genre is hard to define: a mixture of personal memories and mini-essays on a wide range of subjects from philosophy and politics to the atmosphere of the author’s weekend house at Hegymagas near Lake Balaton. This should not surprise Konrád’s readers, for out of the thirty-odd titles to his credit, all mentioned on the sleeve, very few could be defined as “pure” fiction. World Literature in Review 94 WLT MAY–JUNE 2018 Konrád’s subject matter (is this his autobiography ?) may be traditional, but the technique he uses is postmodern: it starts with his birth in April 1933 and continues with reminiscences of his childhood in a small town near the Romanian border, but by page 50 we have moved to 1995, and on the next page the date of the miniessay on the nature of writing is 2008. This adds to the liveliness of the discourse but disrupts the continuity most of us would expect from an autobiography. Still, the careful reader will be able to pick up dates that really matter in Konrád’s life and will find that stories connected with those years are among the best parts of the book: 1944/45, 1956, 1969, and 1990 are all important times for the writer’s survival and continuous rebirth, though I suppose he would also regard the year of his marriage to Judit Lakner (1980) also significant. In 1944 Konrád and his older sister, born in a Jewish family, had been marked out for deportation to Auschwitz but managed to escape from the countryside to Budapest just in time. In October 1956 the writer of

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