The Tropics on Love and Loyalty in Gyorgy Konrad's The Loser [Volume: 7(1988), pp. 270-294]

292
MARIANNA D. BIRNBAUM
The eyes of the rabbi's wife also show the signs of a higher calling,
but her back hurts from all the washing she has to do, and her children
stand in the little puddles and track dirt all over the house. This is
how she must receive God, a little disheveled. The rabbi's life is burdened with ideas, his wife's with children. She loves God, and she
loves this man; what she does not like is that she is left out of the
exclusive friendship that exists between God and the rabbi (81).
T. briefly describes his fellow inmates in the asylum-each has a terrifying fate: a tragedy told in a few lines. But intermixed with the 'weighty'
subjects, for comic relief, there is the wonderful story of a 'local' shaman
woman, a miller's wife, whom every Hungarian student of folklore recognizes, since she knows all the tricks they have studied in class (99).
The Loser is replete with secret obituaries, privy to the informed
reader only. Among them, just as in other parts of the novel, friend and
foe appear in seemingly haphazard fashion. Attila Petschauer, a victim
of the Nazis (Alfred in The Loser), and Matyas Rakosi, Em6 Gero, and
Gabor Peter, the unscrupulous Muscovite leadership of the early 1950s,
are all buried together in the gigantic necropolis of the novel.
The system in its mollified form proceeds-claims T. The murderers
remain: "There are many around us; most live like old athletes" (185).
Poignant comparisons abound in the novel, calling attention to the fact
that truth is simple, one only has to face it. Similes, such as "Truth, like
a bullet, bums through his consciousness" (13) or "consciousness, like
a cat, bites its tail" (14) make the reader aware of a text in which each
sentence could also stand on its own. Metonymies such as, "my consciousness names its object, frames it and kills it" (14) or "my cellmates and I
are five colorless pins about to be knocked over by a bowling ball" (14)
are one-liners revealing profound desperation. And so are, finally, T.'s
views on God:...My maker, who has confused good and evil, who is as human
as a factory manager...but if I go against God, I lock myself in
prison, either as an inmate or as a guard (15).
"Count to one thousand nine hundred and seventy-five and then look
at me and learn something, perhaps, about Teri's country"-says Dani.
Teri's country is death but it is also the symbol of Hungary in 1975 (315).
"Wait. It's not time yet."
"What should we do?"
"Let's just sit on the bench. Rest up after your story."
"And the time for it will come?"
"It will."