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Title: The Loser by George Konrad, Gyhorgy Konrbad, Ivan Sanders ISBN: 0-15-153442-X Publisher: Harcourt Pub. Date: October, 1982 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $14.95

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Average Customer Rating: 3 (1 review)

Rating: 3
Summary: As a whole weaker than its parts: Hungary, 1930s-70s
Comment: This novel spans forty or fifty years of an half-Jewish Hungarian from a provincial town who participates in many of the expected events from the mid-20c. You see through this densely described but thinly plotted series of vignettes life as a small boy regaling you with peasant and small-town stories before the onset of WW2 brings that relative idyll to a close. In one of the strongest sections, the fury of civil war that brings the Nazis, the Soviets, partisans, and communist activists like the narrator into a tremendously violent clash. Like the hero of the book and film "Europa, Europa," the speaker here also must keep switching allegiances as the borders constantly shift and Hungary's caught between the warring powers.

Later, the collapse of bourgeoisie democracy at the machinations of the communists receives a well-described treatment; without some prior knowledge of who some of those only identified by initials here might be in real-life postwar Hungary, however, the effectiveness of this section weakens for Western readers. (Some note or appendix by the translator would've helped.)

The travails of the narrator in prison also become gripping as the Party seeks to tighten its grip on even and especially its own members, in the name of permanent vigilance and the necessity to continually finds scapegoats for the "people" to blame. The 1956 revolt receives a mixed review here, surprising to many weaned on more of a heroic, James Michener rendering.

More prison, more mental hospital (the monologue of the sanitarium director to the narrator on his hospital discharge is priceless), and more pages devoted to the plight of the somewhat pampered intellectual in the service of being a predictable dissident to the West and privileged servant of the East: these concerns take up much of the remainder of the story, along with a substantial amount of spontaneous and/or furtive sex, which seems pro forma for these types of novels (see Klima and Kundera for comparison). The problem, as with Konrad's later "A Feast in the Garden," is that little of the writer's energy seems directed towards creating art rather than commentary. Perhaps the changed circumstances within which Konrad would've labored as a writer under the communist regime to produce this work pertain, but for Western readers, it's not a gripping storyline. You'd benefit from it more for what it conjures up about life under attempted and actual totalitarianism than for a fluid and inventive array of characters, settings, or symbols.

A final note: A mincos (the Hungarian title) means more a "go-between" or a "panderer" rather than "loser." The distinction clarifies the situation often found by a narrator who winds up neither Jew nor Gentile, Communist nor anti-Communist, freed from confinement nor imprisoned behind walls. The prose never really lifts its unrelenting miasmatic tone, but the insights, self-loathing, and panoramic scenes make it an appropriate account of its time and place.