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THE BLACK MAYBE by Attila Veres
A story literally up to its elbow in larvae. Tourists and locals in Hungary mix, the locals demonstrating a harvest ritual that will make you hope you may be the one with black eyes. Utterly transcendent with the genius loci and with something accepted even as much as Hungary perhaps endures the EU against its better nature. The story of a tourist girl who refuses a young male local’s sexual advances — eventually to her soul-depleted cost — and of how, subsequently, beings with different coloured eyes are made from snail oil (and the concomitant oiling of silver chains), and you have to swallow much in order to fly around the staggeringly shocking elbow room of this story — there are four mentions of ‘elbow’ in its ‘fishing’ finale involving broken mirrors, larvae lures and the ‘essence’ of virgin young people or children. But be wary, the whole process is laid out here, and if I were you, maybe your literary virginity should be shriven elsewhere by much transcendent literature before you enter, towards the end of your life, this major example of it … in case you never come out of it again as whole as you went in. That may explain this possibly misguided or depleted review of it.
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Any further reviews of Attila Veres stories will be in the comment stream below…
TO BITE A DOG
“The boy got up on his elbows in the bed. Now it was getting interesting.”
Well, all elbow triggers are like that! A Covid pandemic story, a tale of predator and prey, master and victim, of blood and teeth, of lockdown curfews, of masks and masks of masks, of masks as muzzles, bodily abstractions, and parks at night, and a simple loving relationship between a young man, Zoltán, and a young woman, a relationship become complex and sexually polarised by power, the woman who becomes feral and an instigator of a plague of dog bites amidst the perceived anarchy of the curfews, this having been triggered by her having quelled a dog by biting it on impulse (“the moment she bit the dog her own aura grew”), all eventually evolving into a co-vivid synergy of a double bite that is forced upon the man, quelled himself by becoming a master over animals, growing tall by becoming one of a new plague of pet torturers? No, I think it is arguably Zoltán being induced into a new transgressive code of the Hungarian Kodály Method, as a new Close Encounter after Covid’s social distancing.
FOGTOWN
“They outgrew music, outgrew youth.”
This is a strong episodic documentary by a series of interviews, showing editorial backdrops and drop-ins, and on-line blogs, a suspenseful journey towards gestalt that actually works, and works powerfully. Of sex and suspended orgasm for eons towards a new caged 4’ 33” and, for me, a blank fiction story called that which was printed in 2002 some have said to have heard of.
Of books being unpublished, and books about unheard rock bands in ratty pubs etc., the eponymous band in particular that reminds me of my own still today continued search in the past for Zelenyj’s Deathray Bradburys even before I read about them! This Fogtown work, too, affected me deeply, but differently.
“…he treated the present as a tomb, as if real life existed only in the past and the present was just suspended animation, a trance-like state of drawn-out death.”
Cross-referenced, therefore, with: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/06/06/on-tour-with-the-deathray-bradburys-alexander-zelenyj/
Return to the Midnight School
“We all sang a song Old Béla had taught us that afternoon. It was a rather odd melody. It reminded me of sunsets I had never seen myself because they were before my time, and of sunsets I never will see, because they’ll happen long after I’m dead.”
Béla Bartók ‘always mentioned the miraculous order of nature with great reverence’, according to his son. This story is the miraculous order, as well as disorder, of literature — at one moment a reader-mocking ‘bull-shit’ panoply of horror goo, the next a beautiful pattern of matchless words expressing numinous and nemonymous ideas beyond such goo, skeining together into a white-filamented infinity of connections towards gestalt within the earthiness of gaia, involving ‘distances’, say, between here and Jerusalem or between here and America, between birthhole and deathpit, and vice versa, the polarity of the ‘noon school’ and the ‘midnight school’, as filtered through this narrator’s life in this countryside of human-skinned crops, a narrator in cahoots with an orphan friend from the city who has daredevil ideas on eating stuff he shouldn’t eat and how to meet his dead mom and dad again. And the narrator’s own later life beyond this place and its processes.
I cannot do justice to this story’s dismemberments and regatherings, an uncle who twists your nose, the land’s ‘legged’ or ‘toothy’ crops, allergy plagues, culinary convulsions, deviant spiders, and a child who hears its own father’s corpse roar in the night. Toxins and nightmares. Rules and superstitions. Zeno’s “zero o’clock” and ‘stamen jelly recycle’. Words and sounds. And that’s my own bull-shit done for, too. Still, I haven’t even scratched this story’s surface, but it certainly gets under mine!
“…a strange, atonal growling, not quite singing or speech. At first it’s a flat sound, then it modulates, shifting pitch occasionally, as if their throat were an instrument someone was tuning up for a performance.”
In the Snow, Sleeping
“On the local station some male choir was chanting songs without any semblance of a melody.”
The receptionist at the hotel is Viktor Baláz, and I note Viktor is Bartók’s middle name, and that Béla Balázs wrote the libretto of Bluebeard’s Castle.
As Luca and Robi, an item, travel to the Spa hotel for their vacation, we learn a mass of facts about the nature of ‘time’ and ‘vacation’, and much thought given by Luca to an engagement ring found in Robi’s pocket, and their strange accident in the car on the way to the hotel, and things get increasingly worse in this archetypal weird-hotel story that one expects to stay weird and creepy like the mystery of room 303, but not to become heavily gruesome with outlandish horrors for their own sake to which we are exposed, including cocaine, bleeding noses, bite-a-dog type scars in the shower, a rabid fox in the corridor, wolves and feral children, I could go on and on. But the main thing that shocked me is the mis-continuity at the end in a snowy pit, a pit as if from the midnight school story, that it was a ‘wedding ring’ not an engagement one as stated at the beginning…..
The story is one huge ‘steam bath maze’ with Hell at its core. Holiday traffic ending up in a slaughterhouse’s maw. Impossible to evaluate such a work, so, simply let it become an endless vacation from sanity for an old man like me who can no longer cope with horror stories…. “In one of the pools an old man spread out like an oil spill, his plump arms floating around him, his eyes closed.”
By the way, Balázs originally conceived the aforementioned libretto for his roommate Zoltán Kodály and that Bluebeard was Bartók himself. Deckchair ‘rooms’, notwithstanding.
The Time Remaining
“Perhaps I wanted to save his life by admitting that he wasn’t actually alive.”
Godspeed You! Black Emperor ( GY!BE) … rock music that the group itself stated was Bartók influenced? Another Hungarian Fogtown or Canadian Deathray Bradburys? Let Gyuri be!
This is another horror-incremental work, till it reaches a pitch that is half-joke (say, being buried with an onion to prevent resurrection and about childhood’s plush toys as imaginary friends who are resurrected by stuffing and re-stuffing and being led by the Black Emperor) and seriously half-serious horror that will stuff you into nightmare with its power. The boy as narrator, who sometimes we see as an adult, tells us about his plush toy Vili, and his agonising upon this toy’s slow death and the time remaining to this toy’s life as granted by the boy’s mother, and those plush toys of his friends, including Nyinyi as a nursery song’s variation by Dohnányi? And such processes of disintegration infect their other toys. And the plush toys themselves attack the children horrifically. Highly recommended, if you dare.