The Loser
Konrad, George
THE LOSER George Konrad/Harcourt Brace Jovanovich/$14.95 Reid Buckley You are led into a room where you discover G. Last year you were still on intimate terms with him, but now he doesn't even...
...THE LOSER George Konrad/Harcourt Brace Jovanovich/$14.95 Reid Buckley You are led into a room where you discover G. Last year you were still on intimate terms with him, but now he doesn't even nod his head...
...your loss of manhood means as much to you now as a hat blown away by the wind...
...There are many of us around...
...We've come to the conclusion that you're a British spy ...'" A scene from George Konrad's third novel...
...The higher the state rises over the social edifice, the more paradigmatic each brick becomes—and the more each built-in being knows and likes [my emphasis...
...Compared to us our Western friends are sheep and adolescents...
...They don't know what [a Communist society] is...
...dusty wind is shaking the plane trees...
...I don't know any heroes or geniuses or saints—we are all failed experiments...
...This book is sordid, vulgar, grim, lubricious, turgid...
...If he falls from grace, he gets a gentle hypo with appropriate sedatives...
...Konrad is trying to make us understand: the relatively relaxed present is worse than the ferocious past, because the Hungarian has been remade into a robot...
...he cries of himself and other functionaries, adding, horrifyingly, "and . . . true adults...
...even now, when they are interviewing dissidents...
...it is to accept the irrational and false as the true and good...
...He is no longer so often tortured and killed for his aberrant apostate thoughts: he is committed to a psychiatric hospital, where he is decently cared for so long as he behaves...
...Let things take their course, be amorphous, blend in, don't try to be better than the world around you...
...and to become utterly bland...
...They are trifling beside the awful witness that Konrad raises up...
...Is The loser a good novel...
...if not, the brick is miserable...
...All are taught to be assassins, all to betray...
...Fittingly, the novel opens in a madhouse...
...A humble wayfarer, I tumble from garden to garden, bed to bed, body to body...
...If his superiors like him, the brick is happy...
...the secret police chief, is modeled after Gabor Peter, who existed...
...most live quietly, like old athletes...
...but bit by bit the guilt accumulates...
...it has broken their will, corrupted them to the core...
...He flacks for the regime...
...The two testicles swell to the size of gooses' eggs...
...The Loser...
...he only looks at you curiously and motions to his boys...
...The operation requires a certain rhythm, as do the screams which are so hard to suppress...
...A veritable Founding Father of Hungarian Communism, T. lands a cushy job as director of the national radio...
...Qua fiction, I have my reservations...
...Because the shattering "truth is there are no heavies and no heroes here, only fate and history...
...He is no traitor, and he isn't even all that much of a dissident...
...His socialist faith is not weakened...
...the Orwellian horror] his place in the great wall...
...With the first words we are plunged into T.'s ravaged stream of consciousness: "I talk all day, I keep hearing things...
...Eastern Europe during this terrible age is almost beyond our powers of comprehension...
...Finally, T. sees what he has become...
...But my brother raises his gun high and shoots until the magazine is empty...
...or maybe a wee spell of shock treatments...
...The time span is from World War II to the present, tracking through his protagonist, T., the first Hungarian Communist regime, the failed revolution of 1956, and the aftermath...
...moments out of the past, like honeycomb cells during extraction, burst open—riffraff overrun my dreams...
...The trick is to learn the virtues of lunacy...
...In which the horror, because this episode of sadistical torture—T...
...Many of the characters in this book—maybe all the public ones —have their originals in Hungary's postwar history...
...They wheel in a chair used in gynecological examinations, sit you in it naked, and strap your spread out feet in metal stirrups...
...In helpless, futile rage...
...endures several—is far from the worst that happens to him...
...T. is no British spy...
...Do not miss it.o not miss it...
...There it is to exist in an endless Night of the Living Dead, where the Saturns of the State devour first the bodies of their get and then their minds...
...Grandfather, in white graveclothes, sits at our feet, pleading with us to throw away our machine guns...
...Modern Communism has emptied people of their humanity...
...they radiat pain . . . You want to be a cut-open animal hung on a steel hook...
...The place is Hungary...
...I stand on top of a truck with my younger brother...
...To survive in a Soviet satellite, Konrad says, is to lose more than your virility: it is to lose person and soul...
...The reality of survival in such a world is merciless...
...We are wolves...
...Do not simply turn down the person who asks you to sign a letter of protest—turn him in [emphases the author's] . . . Say that all truths are partial truths...
...Witty comments about the size of your genital organs: 'Why did it shrivel up so?' . . . 'You can say good-bye to it, pal.' The chief smiles . . . The fellows take turns standing between your stretched out legs, and their truncheons, like drumsticks, keep dancing, now on your testicles, now on your belly...
...The chief: 'Have you had enough, T...
...T. is uncompromisingly materialist (there is no religious dimension in Konrad's world) and profoundly pessimistic...
...He cheerfully assassinates character (one of his friends says to the widow of a comrade he helped to betray, when, many years later, he is asked by her how he manages to live with his guilt: "Like a murderer...
...And in this fashion, inwardly raging with the tumult of his recollections, the story of T. unfolds: from his origins as the grandson of a rich Jewish merchant through his early militant Communism, torture under the Nazis, torture under the paranoiac Soviets, who condemn him to a forced labor battalion...
Vol. 16 • March 1983 • No. 3
