{"id":276556,"date":"2010-02-11T15:05:03","date_gmt":"2010-02-11T15:05:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2010\/02\/11\/the-ninth-by-ferenc-barnas-btba-2010-fiction-longlist\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T14:39:39","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T14:39:39","slug":"the-ninth-by-ferenc-barnas-btba-2010-fiction-longlist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2010\/02\/11\/the-ninth-by-ferenc-barnas-btba-2010-fiction-longlist\/","title":{"rendered":""The Ninth" by Ferenc Barn\u00e1s [BTBA 2010 Fiction Longlist]"},"content":{"rendered":"

Over the next five days, we’ll be highlighting a book a day from the Best Translated Book Award fiction longlist.<\/a> Click here<\/a> for all past write-ups.<\/em><\/p>\n

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The Ninth<\/em><\/a> by Ferenc Barn\u00e1s. Translated from the Hungarian by Paul Olchv\u00e1ry. (Hungary, Northwestern University Press)<\/b><\/p>\n

Below is a guest post from Bill Marx, one of this year’s fiction judges and the man behind PRI<\/span>’s World Books.<\/a> We’ll run another guest post of his later this weekend.<\/em><\/p>\n

A brilliantly unconventional look at life in a small village outside of Budapest in the late 1960s, Ferenc Barn\u00e1s\u2019s marvelous novel The Ninth<\/em> comes off as an inventively dour, sardonically humorous version of Huckleberry Finn<\/em>, except that the book\u2019s nine-year-old narrator can\u2019t light out for the territories once he begins to understand the duplicities of home, society and morality. His indigence is too overwhelming, his family situation too absurd (he has nine siblings) and the soft authoritarianism of the government too robustly restrictive.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s more, Barn\u00e1s gives his observant child hero an additional handicap \u2013 a disability that makes it difficult for him to speak and to read. Thus book\u2019s central metaphor works itself out with grim logic: in surroundings this resolutely repressive, everything of value—creativity, morality, truth, and humanity—is bottled up inside, pressurized. What sort of steam could escape the Communist stopper? The answer suggests why Barn\u00e1s\u2019s third novel, which he admits is autobiographical, takes the form it does—a child\u2019s frank, fanciful, and anarchistic view of moral survival amid repression.<\/p>\n

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Yet Barn\u00e1s doesn\u2019t revel in the gloom, an admirable artistry of refusal that turns away from predictable opportunities for extremism to nurture an indirection and subtlety that only deepens the factual surrealism of the situation and the time. The ninth child lives in a poverty-stricken, secretive Catholic family that scrapes along by selling rosaries and religious gewgaws condemned by the Communist government. The boy\u2019s domestic and school life is marked by starvation, overcrowding (the ten children sleep in three beds), overwork and abuse. His father is tyrannical and short-tempered; his mother is kind but passive. In the course of the book the family\u2019s exhausting focus, under the father\u2019s stern command, is to earn enough money to move into a larger house. <\/p>\n

Barn\u00e1s conveys the environment\u2019s barbarism through ironic humor (\u201cOne afternoon, when for some reason I wasn\u2019t in the mood to mutilate frogs out in the yard with the others . . .\u201d) and memories of violence that are kept off-stage (\u201cthe other day our father gave us twenty lashes on our soles for being late, he used the iron\u2019s chord but it was better than watching klaro get it . . .\u201d). Catholicism serves as a rich satiric source of meager solace, wry hypocrisy, and amusingly secular observations, such as the peculiar but understandable satisfactions the inarticulate kid finds in serving as an altar boy: \u201cIt\u2019s so good to see people shut their eyes while sticking their tongues above the tray! Nowhere else could I see so many different sorts of tongues; lots of them are quivering, and some are colored stranger than I ever would have thought.\u201d <\/p>\n

It is this agile emphasis on homey detail rather than trauma and despair that has led the book\u2019s too few reviewers to dwell on Barn\u00e1s\u2019s admirable modesty and nuance. For me, The Ninth<\/em> is all the more provocative because it depicts, through a nimble exploration of a child\u2019s stream-of-consciousness, the vicissitudes of his imagination, and the tee-tottering state of his soul amid the village\u2019s sickening perfidy, corruption, and stupidity. When the kid steals money from his teacher and spends his ill-gotten gains on cakes and candies for his classmates the idea is not to stage a pint-sized crime and punishment. <\/p>\n

Barn\u00e1s wants us watch his narrator shape the parameters of the self he will become, dramatizing whether the child will absorb the guilt and spiritual poverty around him or become an individual by embracing the possibility of change, by speaking the self-incriminating truth. Memorably, his confession seems to burst out of him, against his will: \u201cEverything becomes even hotter inside me as something begins surging up into my chest, something sure to gush into my mouth in no time: the saliva is already sour in my throat, as at other times. \u2018It was me,\u2019 I say.\u201d What looks like a modest tale of growing up becomes a far more ambitious examination of the formation of an ethical consciousness, almost out of thin air, in an authoritarian state built on lies and coercion. <\/p>\n

Barn\u00e1s\u2019s nine-year-old narrator is a brave construct, an unconsciously sophisticated consciousness that filters life\u2019s hardships and decisions through a startling innocence, an amoral earnestness. The character\u2019s emotional life is weirdly attenuated, his thoughts often taking on a gnomic vagueness redolent of post-modern philosophy: \u201cIt must count a lot, what we assume on account of what, and what we imagine we hear in what; at least that\u2019s what the last month taught me.\u201d Translator Paul Olchv\u00e1ry skillfully captures the novel\u2019s fascinating blend of arch artificiality, sharp-eyed realism, and antic fantasy, all at the service of depicting the inner life of the marginal among us.<\/p>\n

\n<\/a>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Over the next five days, we’ll be highlighting a book a day from the Best Translated Book Award fiction longlist. Click here for all past write-ups. The Ninth by Ferenc Barn\u00e1s. Translated from the Hungarian by Paul Olchv\u00e1ry. (Hungary, Northwestern University Press) Below is a guest post from Bill Marx, one of this year’s fiction […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":292,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67476],"tags":[12916,29976,24106,3996,24116,706,1646,24126],"class_list":["post-276556","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-best-translated-book-awards","tag-bill-marx","tag-btba-2010","tag-ferenc-barnas","tag-hungarian-literature","tag-northwestern-university-press","tag-paul-olchvary","tag-review","tag-the-ninth"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276556","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/292"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=276556"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276556\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":322546,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276556\/revisions\/322546"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=276556"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=276556"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=276556"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}