Stupendous, singular and impeccable
Stupendous is an apt word to describe the 13 stories of “Ghost Geographies.” Prodigious certainly fits Tamas Dobozy’s singular pieces; so do complex and demanding. Spare, easygoing and snacksized belong nowhere on a list of descriptors.
“Ghost Geographies” can be read as a companion volume to “Siege 13,” Dobozy’s last story volume, which won awards and accolades nine years ago. The siege of Budapest (ending, bloodily, in 1945), oppressive, arbitrary, and generally disastrous postwar Hungarian politics, and a traumatized population of émigrés in southern Ontario, fully woven into that earlier volume, are evident throughout “Ghost.” Reappearing too: the crushing fallout of history and the heartbreaking (and often futile) efforts to outmanoeuvre it. But the phrase companion volume does Dobozy a disservice, since it’s possible to read “more of the same” into the phrase. And that’s not the case. The stories in “Ghost” are wilder and more experimental; they’re funnier, too, if you rely on Vaclav Havel’s definition: “The only thing I can recommend at this stage is a sense of humor, an ability to see things in their ridiculous and absurd dimensions.”
Although sobering words — atrocity, misery, despair and insanity — form a leitmotif in Dobozy’s book, his stories focus on men and women who survive, though never without assorted wounds.
And sometimes they’re successes, give or take. “Nom de Guerre,” “Four by Kline Caro” “Lester’s Exit,” and “Black Hearted Villains” present artists as figures wrestling with ludicrous reality via words, music, films, and drawings. “Villains,” an account of a writer invited to write about an illicit jazz octet in Hungary (that played only one song, but never the same way), portrays its dictatorial leader as responding to a society marked by “horrors, the torture of political prisoners, midnight disappearances, mass executions, a condition of daily fear.”
Similarly, the labyrinthine title piece revives a wanderer whose name might have been Sandor Eszterhazy. The impoverished man came to North America in 1940, settled nowhere, created beautiful objects that “envisioned a new kind of country” in vacant lots, and died in obscurity.
Crackling with energy, Dobozy’s comic stories dwell lightly on violence and ruined souls. In “The Glory Days of Donkey Kong” a former judge (and inmate) in Hungary leans heavily on a cane in 1981, in Kitchener, where he plays video games. Thoughts of repentance and salvation in his head, he realizes his true character during a brutal tussle at an arcade. Running fifty pages, “Ray Electric” tells of Karoly Banko, an Olympic hopeful who kills the director of the Hungarian team (a brute who “arrives late, stinking of vodka and someone else’s wife). Fleeing the country in a homemade air balloon, he eventually winds up as a bouncer in Kitchener and a prowrestler. It ends with a literal punch to the face decades in the making. If there’s such a thing a black mirth, Dobozy holds it in his grip.
“Ghost Geographies” isn’t for the faint of heart. Its rewards, however, are ample, its craft impeccable.