Novel
Following a car crash a young woman in her twenties falls into a coma. When he is not by her sickbed her father spends his time investigating the causes of the accident. On an estate near the motorway there live a brother and sister: though in adjacent rooms, they might as well be on two different continents. These four characters are the protagonists of the book and at the same time the story’s narrators. For all of them the accident turns out to be a life-changing event: finding themselves in a radically unfamiliar situation, the narrative of the lives that they have constructed for themselves is turned upside down and reordered.
Thus there are four narrators. The voice of Dorka, who is unconscious, is at first represented with intelligible sentences but these slowly disintegrate into phantoms, impressions, and fragments of consciousness, indicative of the fact that the young woman in a coma is coming ever closer to the end of her life. The voice of Dorka’s father, a divorced history teacher in his fifties, is characterised by suffering, self-reproach, and above all by burnout. The accident forces him to confront his own as well as his daughter’s past, and in so doing he finds an unexpected chance of a strange love affair.
As for the siblings living without their parents, the voice of the twenty-year-old young man is teeming with slang and vulgar language: he doesn’t go to school, he is not at work, and tries to make his aimless existence bearable through drugs and friends that even he finds intolerable. The fourth voice is that of his sister, the sensitive and introspective Zsófi, who has been left alone with her younger brother and thus obliged to grow up all too quickly.
Gradually light is shed on the dramatic and complex nature of this network of four characters. Dorka’s father meets and falls in love with the much younger Zsófi. Only at the very end of the novel do we discover that Zsófi’s job is to sit in front of CCTV screens, and that therefore she is very familiar with the circumstances of the car crash. She knows that it was Dorka who yanked the steering wheel aside to avoid three young men who dashed in front of her car. As she examines the footage, it dawns on Zsófi that one of them was her own brother.
This novel shows a clash between four characters, four different experiences of life, and two different social milieus, and although the lives of the actors become entangled, in reality they never meet, since the soundtrack in the head of each of them is quite different. The relationships between them may be a loving one, or that between parent and child, or brother and sister, yet in spite of this each remains in his or her own bubble, unable to take a step out of their individual consciousness, out of the landscape that the others find unfathomable.
People remain silent, just saying their piece, to themselves and by themselves.
Product details
ISBN 978 963 1440 18 8
2020, hard cover with jacket
320 pages, 125×197 mm
3699 HUF
English and German excerpts available
Magvető Rights 