If you've ever had the experience of a dream where you're trying desperately to run away from an unknown pursuer but no matter how much effort you expend it gets harder and harder to flee then you will understand this book and perhaps appreciate the book. The protagonist in this novel experiences this dream in a multitude of variations each variation equaling frustrating. All-in-all a very clever book. ( )

Metropole, which was published in 1970, is considered a classic of Hungarian literature, but it was not published in the US until 2008.

Budai is a Hungarian linguist who intends to travel to Helsinki for a conference. He unknowingly gets on a wrong plane, falls asleep for the entire flight, and finds himself in a most unfamiliar city. Despite his fluency in multiple language and his professional background, he cannot communicate with anyone and cannot decipher the strange characters that constitute the written language of the city. He is constantly surrounded by teeming masses of people who shove and kick each other to get anywhere, and he is carried with the crowd to a bus which takes him to a hotel in the city.

He manages to obtain a room in the hotel, but his passport is taken from him by a desk clerk who he never sees again. He spends his days in futile and often humorous attempts to accomplish the most basic tasks, such as ordering lunch. He befriends an attractive young elevator operator, but he never learns her name, and he gives her a new name every time he sees her.

His money eventually runs out, and his life spirals out of control, as he becomes more desperate and unstable. The story takes a surprising turn toward the end, as the neighborhood he is in descends into chaos and violence. ( )

A funny thing happens to Budai on the way to Helsinki: stepping off the plane he inexplicably finds himself trapped in a steroidal metropolis where no one understands any of the dozen or so languages he happens to speak. It doesn't take him long to figure out that he's not in Helsinki. But if it's not Helsinki, then where is he? And why can he find no one who speaks a language he's familiar with?

As much an intellectual speculation on how language can both include and marginalize as it is a commentary on urban life, _Metropole_ works because Karinthy so convincingly conveys the frustration Budai (and ultimately, the reader) feels when confronted with the fact that he can't even do something as simple as order a meal in a restaurant or ask for directions to the train station without eliciting irritation and contempt from the city's grumpy, harried and monolingual everyman denizens.

The novel is loaded with menace, but its an intellectual menace, one that attacks some hidden root in our psyche that is rarely singled out in modern literature: our confidence in our own ability to help ourselves. Every effort Budai makes to sort out where he's at, how he got there, how he can survive day to day, and how he can get home is thwarted time and time again simply because he does not possess the one tool we take most for granted, our ability to communicate ourselves to other people. His only succor is an unlikely relationship he develops with the elevator operator in his hotel, and even this is fraught with misunderstanding and miscommunications.

The real star of this story, though, is not Budai, but the city itself. A teeming Every-City home to twice as many people as it should be, the streets are packed beyond capacity, every store and service weighed down by long lines, every sidewalk loaded with ill-mannered pedestrians jostling elbow to elbow, every street a stream of bumper-to-bumper traffic. Half the fun of the book is Budai's curious observations of a culture not unlike that of Western Europe or the United States if it were reflected back to us in a warped carnival mirror. Growth seems to be the city's only purpose, and as Budai cranes his neck off the top of one of the city's tallest buildings he can see no end to it in any direction he looks. Further, a skyscraper that's under construction near his hotel seems to add a new floor everyday, climbing ever upward.

There are lots of wonderful moments in this novel, moments of pure exhaustion where we sit with Budai in some far lost corner of this placeless place and reel to think that the madness of urban life is being reflected back at us as a logical conclusion that may or may not be foregone. All of it leads to a spectacular ending that, perhaps not surprisingly, calls up the ghost of Hungary's aborted 1956 revolution, a bloody mess the pulls the curtain back so that, if only for a moment, we glimpse the hard iron framework supporting the backdrop of a city that never sleeps. ( )

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Ferenc Karinthy (1921-1992), a trained linguist, was the son of famed Hungarian writer playwright Frigyes Karinthy. Not surprisingly, then, the complexity and confusion of language is the central theme of Karinthy's 1970 novel "Metropole" (originally entitled "Epépé"), the Kafkaesque tale of a hapless narrator stranded on the top floor of the figurative Tower of Babel.

The plot builds upon a basic but very ironic premise: Budai, a linguist, seems to have boarded the wrong plane on his way to a conference in Helsinki and has now ended up in a mysterious city in an unknown country with a singularly incomprehensible language. It is packed to overflowing: human congestion spills from the lobbies out into the streets and Budai is rudely rushed down sidewalks and through lines. Even the solitude of the hotel room he manages to acquire is afflicted by the alien alphabet he encounters in a framed printout presumably of hotel regulations. The overwhelming effect is one of claustrophobia reinforced by a rambling syntax that pushes headlong from page to page in lengthy paragraphs. A harried Budai roams from place to place in time with the narrative rhythm, attempting unsuccessfully to find . . . a way . . . out . . . OF . . . HERE! The very density of the urban dreamscape - its unyielding masses of humanity and mazes of streets, alleys, passageways, myriads of neighborhoods - seems to compress into a solid wall, entrapping Budai as effectively as any stone-and-mortar fortification. The mounting tension is palpable, even as it superficially plateaus when Budai settles into his hotel room, finds some work, and even acquires a sort of girlfriend. Obviously such fragile comfort cannot possibly last: it must prelude some catastrophe, which, when it comes, seems naturally inevitable as the expected fate of a stranger in a wholly strange land.

Yet strangely enough, however, Budai's demeanor throughout his ordeal is not one of panic or outright desperation; on the contrast, he is more perturbed than anything else. He is similar in that respect to many of Kafka's protagonists, particularly Gregor Samsa the giant bug, as an individual whose reaction to a grotesque or extraordinary situation is one of bemusement or annoyance rather than shock or terror. This lends a greater element of realism to "Metropole" that might have been otherwise submerged in emotional bombast. "Metropole" is frightening because it comes across as a probable scenario - not because it is a horror novel in the Stephen King or Dean Koontz sense of the term. In fact, it reminded me, oddly enough, of "Johnny Got His Gun," as a tale of a man locked in a nightmarish scenario and desperate make himself understood. What "Metropole" also does quite effectively is to unearth the subliminal fears of anonymity and invisibility in contemporary society. Indeed, it is a story of individuality and subjectivity taken to their greatest extreme: if each citizen of "Metropole" is actually uttering a verbal articulation of their own private language, as Budai comes to suspect, then maybe the driving force behind modern isolation is precisely this teeming urban obscurity, in addition to Western culture's emphasis on personal independence, personal ambition, personal expression, personal gratification, ad infinitum. If Budai is jarringly cool about his predicament, then perhaps that is because his situation is merely a farcical extension of the realities of modern life.

Despite its relatively unknown status in the United States, "Metropole" is actually considered a modern classic. Its unspecified setting and multilingual protagonist contribute to a greater international, cross-cultural appeal, especially as the nameless city is described as both a wanly generic and strikingly diverse place that any reader anywhere can envision for themselves. The bizarre nature of the story is itself an attraction, since one cannot help but wonder where all this could possibly lead to. "Metropole," therefore, comes highly recommended. ( )