György Dalos

This is very nearly a great book. It's a good book, and it comes right up to the brink of great, but alas falls short.

I'm not entirely sure that Nineteen Eighty-Four needed a sequel—I rather assumed that The Party went on forever and that the bleak authoritarian world presented by Orwell was self-sustaining—but Dalos' short novel does well enough to break out of that.

Where this story shines is in the footnotes, oddly enough. The only other book I can think of that did so good a job of making the footnotes an integral part of the reading experience is Asimov's 'Murder at the ABA'.

Let's be clear that Dalos does not write in Orwell's style, nor does he even bother trying to write in Orwell's style. It's part pastiche, part homage, and part "you know, maybe this situation is untenable". And in a state as completely controlled as Oceania is, in a way Big Brother cannot die. Dalos tackles that problem directly, and addresses what happens when a totalitarian state is incontrovertibly confronted with an external power that's greater than any it can muster. And it becomes partly like watching a train wreck, and partly like watching a disassembly—both from, fortunately, a safe distance.

Definitely recommended.… (more)

Ever wonder what happened after Winston Smith embraced his love of Big Brother? Well, I did, and one of the great "downer" books of all time has what amounts to a followup in Gyorgy Dalos' 1985.

Dalos subtitled this book What Happens After Big Brother Dies, and that pretty much describes this slim volume too, though it's not a narrative so much as it is a collection of "documents" written by the protagonists of the original story, predominately: Smith, his lover Julia Miller, and his torturer with the Thought Police, James O'Brien, though there are some descriptive elements from other voices for detail. It is assembled as a historical essay of sorts, and it is as exhaustively footnoted as such a piece should be.

Interestingly, and cunningly, the footnotes are where a good portion of the action actually takes place. Slowly we see the historian/author apparently going mad—or is he sane, and it's the system which is mad?—and ultimately finds himself in sort of the same predicament in which Smith is in at the conclusion. Not surprising, and not at all unsatisfying, though be aware that the pleasure you (and, indeed, I) might take at seeing the fall of Ingsoc isn't so much of a fall as it is a stumble into the waiting arms of Eurasia, which by all appearances is just as dark and sinister as was Oceania. Funny how that ends up, and funny too how our own world is so similar…Dalos in his own way is as prescient as was Orwell way back when.

I'm not quite sure exactly where I picked this piece up, though I want to say it was at the last of the fabulous Goodwill Book Sales they used to have at the Tennessee State Fairgrounds. That would've been in 1991, I think, and yes, I kept this book all these years knowing I'd get around to reading it, figuring it looked too intriguing to be a dull read. Turns out I was right, and it seems others agree: thirty years after its publication you can still find copies of it. This is one that cries out to be transferred to e-reader format for a wider distribution. We can always learn from a work like this.

Not just a curiosity, 1985 is a genuine must-read for anyone who enjoyed the original work.… (more)

I was extremely skeptical about this book, given the rather overly-jovial blurb. It promised the story of a "self-proclaimed Hungarian Jew for Christ, a painfully overweight 'half-orphan' with a hypochondriac mother" and his decision about whether or not to be circumcised. What I expected was a scatological comedy with lots of jokes about Jewishness and penises. What I got was an excellent dark comedy about the search for identity, and an examination of family dysfunction painfully told through the eyes of a naive boy.

The boy, Robi, is Jewish by birth, but not by faith, and he cannot reconcile his jewish identity with his non-jewish beliefs. Although he doesn't understand the world he sees, he is able to describe enough of it for us to understand what he can't. He has an overbearing communist grandmother, and a neurotic obese mother who is no support in his search for identity. He is constantly an outsider: Jewish to gentiles, a gentile to Jews, and he has no idea how to give himself meaning. Meanwhile, as he searches unhappily for some sort of foothold on identity, his family falls apart around him.

Although the tone is overtly light, there is, at heart, nothing funny about Robi's plight. It is painful to observe, and Dalos' brilliant use of humour allows him to delve deeply into a family on the verge of meltdown. This book won a place in my heart despite me not expecting to like it one little bit from the start, which, I think, is a fairly high recommendation. It is a short, quick read, and one I think anyone who like dark humour should keep an eye out for.… (more)