George Konrad (1933–2019)

. The Case Worker by Gyorgy Konrad (1969, 1974)

Hungarian writer Gyorgy Konrad has been called the "true heir of Kafka," and this, his first novel, was one of the books added to the list of 1001 books to read before you die in 2008.

The case worker, a child welfare worker in Budapest, has become increasingly dissatisfied with his job. As he tries to resolve the situation of a brain-damaged child who has spent his entire life chained to a feces-smeared crib, and whose parents have just show more committed suicide, he ruminates on his life:

"My defensive reflexes are slack, more and more often the blows hit me in the pit of the stomach....Other people's sufferings have been affecting me lately: my head is full of their stories, my dreams are live with them....What can I do in the face of this frenzied squirming, which gets nowhere and regularly ends in defeat? Nothing, or next to nothing. I observe it, I draw parables from disaster, and compile records of failure...My job is to sell indifference and normalcy."

This is how he describes his job:

"I must huddle and render judgement. Don't throw the newborn into the garbage pail. Don't let your infant starve. If baby is ill, call a doctor. It is not advisable to tie a baby to his crib, sit him down on a hot stove, shut him up in the ice box, put his finger in an electric socket, or beat him with a trouser belt, rolling pin, chair leg, carpet beater, wooden spoon, broom stick, clothes line or shoe heel. Refrain from raping teenage girls, particularly your own. While making love do not crush your sleeping child against the wall. Do not feed him brandy, don't pawn his winter coat, don't give your girl friend his supper, don't let him be devoured by lice, don't call his mother a whore or his father a bastard, don't threaten him with your service pistol, don't send him out begging, don't sell him to elderly queers, don't urinate in his school bag, don't leave him behind on the train, don't cheat him, don't laugh at him, don't shout him down, don't bellow at him, don't shame him; in a word, as far as possible respect the innocence of his beginnings."

He comes to the final realization:

"Actually, what I do amounts to nothing. I regulate the traffic of suffering, sending it this way and that, passing on the loads that pile up on me to institutions or private citizens."

This is a bleak and grim book. I know there are lots of readers who quite understandably prefer not to read books like this. But if you can handle it, the writing is stellar, and the questions raised are profound.

Recommended
3 1/2 stars show less

György Konrád is known for writing that are rich in provoking images and at the same time full of ideas. In De Stedebouwer (1975/ 1992) he takes this to the extreme. What an images! The narrative is as much about a city planners life as it is about the nameless city. By telling the story of the city he reflects on loved ones, his family, political organization and utopias. It is wonderful, from bitter realistic descriptions of power and violence to dreamlike scenes of bacchanal national show more holidays, what a mix.

For György Konrád, a Hungarian writer, the writer is in the first place an attentive visitor, not an revolutionary (see: Canvas). In the book we see the protagonist develop towards this statement. The young city planner is an idealist, someone who believes in the possibility of human intervention and construction of a ideal society by the means of a strong bureaucratic apparatus. During the book he becomes more and more skeptical and in favor of freedom, the right city is the city where it's citizens will not have to be afraid of each other, where one can say what is my need without hiding it in general formulations of the greater good.

All these reflections gives food for thought and has the effect on me as reader that I become sensible for being in general, how the people walk, how they make the same mistakes over and over, and how the good life comes from acceptance. In this way, Konrád's writing can be read as a manifest for acquiescence, which is understandable. The book was written in 1975 under communist rule. Konrád always refused to leave the country though the political leaders of the time wanted him to leave, -- ideas currently echoed by Orban sympathizers (see Hungarianspectrum Orban goverments attack on György Konrád) --, so Konrád probably had to find a way of living in a situation where he was forbidden to publish and had no influence on the dictatorial government.

In a review published in Oase, the book is described as "a bullseye which you can suck on for hours before it suddenly changes color, with full page sentences laden with picturesque ideas, in which you start with the exuberant celebration of national holiday on the central square and end up with an execu­tion." (Veldhuisen in Oase in English and Dutch). This is 100% correct, but I warn you. The richnesses of images require serious reading stamina, for me that meant leaving the book alone after every couple of pages, just to let my experience find its proper place. Treat this (and Konráds other) book(s) as a bullseye indeed, and start you adventure with this extraordinary European writer. show less

This was a difficult book to read and is a difficult one to write about. Why? Both because of the structure of the novel and because of Konrád's writing style. The narrator is a city planner in an unnamed Hungarian town who has lived through both World War II and the communist takeover. But the reader doesn't know this at first (except from reading the blurb on the back of the book). Instead, the book begins as the narrator wakes up one morning and muses about various topics including the show more death of his wife. But he muses in what is essentially a stream of consciousness way, and the whole book is like this, occasionally direct and understandable but more often dream-like and even surrealistic. Additionally, Konrád writes by piling phrase upon phrase, image upon image, and it is often not at all clear what he is writing about or how one topic connects to another.

Essentially, the narrator is reviewing his life, but in a nonchronological manner. The reader learns not only about the death of his wife, but about his childhood, his father, how he met his wife, the nature of his work and how it differs from that of his father who was a pre-communism planner and architect, the nature of socialist planning, wartime, prison, torture, God and religion, and more. The novel is also a meditation on the meaning of life and freedom, history and social revolutions, cities and communities, and fathers and sons. But all of this is enveloped in prose that is hard to decipher, although beautifully written. Here is an example, by far not the most obscure.

For me, this city is a challenge, a parable, an interrogation frozen in space, the messages of my fellow citizens dead and alive, a system of disappearing and regenerating worlds to come, the horizontal delineation of societies replacing one another by sperm, gunfire, senility; a fossilized tug of war, an Eastern European showcase of devastation and reconstruction . . . Because by virtue of my practiced clichés I have become one of its shareholders; though beyond the tenuous links of my existence and surroundings, beyond my father's overdecorated gravestone and the haunting shadow of a cremated woman, beyond my hardened and irremediable blueprints, my myopic utopias, and the procession of figures out of an ever-darkening past, I could well ask: what have I to do with this East-Central European city whose every shame I know so well. p.22

The introduction to my Dalkey Archive edition, by Carlos Fuentes, compares the experience and writing style of Central Europeans to those of writers from Central and South America and contrasts them with writers from the west, and especially those from the US who, to oversimplify, he feels are always seeking happiness. I didn't find his thoughts particularly helpful in understanding Konrád or this book, but I see some parallels between Konrád's writing style and that of Fuentes in Terra Nostra although, of course, they deal with very different subjects.

I felt lost through a lot of this novel but, having finished, I almost feel I should start at the beginning again to more fully appreciate what Konrád was doing. I feel I missed a lot the first time through, but I understood enough to realize what an impressive writer Konrád is and what complicated ideas he was exploring. show less

Gyorgy Konrad's novel "The Case Worker" is incredibly bleak, but well written. I liked the book overall, even though it had some pretty disturbing scenes in it, making it a book I wouldn't particularly want to read again.

The story is set in Hungary, where a social services worker becomes very engaged with one of his clients -- a little boys whose parents have died. The boy has high special needs and no one to take care of him.

The novel is pretty gritty and a bit sad, but presents an show more interesting point of view. I'm glad to have read it. show less