This is a squalid, obscene, continuously dark story of a disturbed family. There are abyssal moments of perversion, neurosis, psychosis, and delusion that can also be found in many sentimental North American novels of the sort publicized by Oprah, but this book is different. The Romanian-born Hungarian author is very much of his time and place: there is mordant black humor (made familiar in the West in Kundera, but more akin to the sharper postmodern humor in contemporary Czech writing like Viewegh's); routine admissions of debilitating moral weakness (in the end, an inheritance of Beckett); eastern-European style surrealism (a whore with twenty birds, who also poisons birds in her spare time); compulsively disgusting inventories of bodily fluids (lots of stains, smells, and sticky fingers); a remnant of Soviet-era paranoia and disaffection about government and the church; and a post-structural dedication to a lack of progress or any passing melioration (the character never really tries to understand himself). In short: no American sentimentality, and no American moral for self-improvement. In that, Bartis is more like A.L. Kennedy than any best seller.

If there's a problem with the book, I think it is momentum. It is clear that Bartis had the rudiments of a plot--a priest, introduced near the beginning, comes back in the end, and so forth. But after a while there is not much impetus to turn the page, other than to find one of the scattered dead-end epiphanies that structure the book. The character doesn't change, even though his only real love affair is the book's central event; and it's clear Bartis wrote this in a series of dissociated one-page bursts. Some of them read like prose poems, and they are all separated by asterisms. So the book keeps starting and stopping. That, and the unrelieved gloom, must be the reasons Rivka Galchen describes it as "even Endgame-ish" on the back cover: it is less like Beckett than "Naked Lunch."

Another difficulty is that Bartis apparently counts on his readers to feel a strange elation when he confronts them with unspeakable horrors. That strange elation is often apparently meant to include a bit of laughter: we are shocked, we shiver and laugh, and then we take a bit of comfort in having looked, at least for a moment, into something genuinely lightless. The main character has spent fifteen years living at home with his reclusive mother after his sister abandoned them; his mother had actually bought a plot in the cemetery and held a mock funeral in which she buried her daughter's things. The son goes on pretending that his sister is sending their mother letters--he writes the letters himself--and the mother gives the son letters to post to the sister. Toward the end of the book it turns out that all the mother's letters were blank: she knew, all along, that the son was writing letters supposedly from the sister. As this story is revealed, we are meant to be shocked and amused, and take some small and disreputable pleasure in knowing we have now experienced, even if only through an undependable narrator in a novel, something really repellent about human nature. But what if these effects don't work? What if I don't laugh? What if I'm not shocked? What if I begin to feel that the plot devices are too garish, too artificial, too deliberately disturbing? What if I start wishing I were re-reading "Molloy" or "The Unnamable" instead? What if I begin to wish that Bartis felt he could communicate certain depths without pinpricks, spilled fluids, psychotic breaks, and new categories of squalor?

In the end, for me, this book is a bit trapped in the heritage of eastern European realism and surrealism. I will read something else of his, but only if it seems he has found a way to turn the volume down.

(It's true that the book entirely deserves the translation prize. There are virtually no missteps and a large number of felicitous turns of phrase that seem entirely appropriate, don't take me out of the narrative, and yet seem like brilliant inventions on the part of the translator.) ( )