Mihaily and Erzsi are newly-weds and we join them on their honeymoon in Venice.  We rapidly learn that Mihaily is a vague, other-worldly man, who seems barely planted on the earth.

Even during the first week of the honeymoon he finds himself one night wandering the back streets of Venice for in a sort of dream, not returning to the hotel until dawn.  At one point we read a beautifully ironic and sarcastic letter to Mihaily from Erzsi’s ex-husband Zoltan, giving him instructions on how to care for Erzsi and perfectly describing Mihaily’s character:

If I were a woman, and had to choose between the two of us, I too would have chosen you without hesitation and Erzi surely loves you for being just the sort of person you are – so utterly withdrawn and abstracted that you haven no real relationship with anybody or anything, like someone from another planet, a Martian on earth, someone who never really notices anything . . . who never pays proper attention when others speak, who often seems to act out of vague goodwill and politeness as if playing at being human.

Erzsi soon realises that her marriage is based on the fiction that the two understand each other perfectly. However when Erzsi starts to explain himself, the more confusing he becomes because he holds secrets even from himself, and fails to understand that people other than himself also have an inner life.  The marriage is not going to last!  But the way it soon ends is uniquely strange, and perhaps shows the shallowness of its foundations from the start.

The story then divides, following the courses of both Mihaily and Erzsi as they go their separate ways.  Erszi goes to Paris and lives with a girl-friend, meeting up again with Zoltan and various other unique characters.  At one point she seems to be offered up to a wealthy Persian as part of a business transaction but manages to assert herself sufficiently to extricate herself and make her own choices after the disastrous second marriage.

Mihaily on the other hand continues journeying through Italy, having a series of misfortunes along the way which reveal much about the flaws in his character.  An other-worldly but self-regarding and self-indulgent personality, but also self-deceiving, with high ideals which he drops at the merest hint of inconvenience to himself.

It is the energetic writing style which marks this book out as special. The narrative pace is fast, but it is the insights into human existence along the way which make it sparkle.  Antal Szerb has no illusions about his characters for all are deeply flawed, and I found myself recognising with new insight, the same traits in myself and those I encounter in daily life.  A bookish person myself, I confess that not everything in Mihailys character was new to me, and to some degree, following the course of these people was an exercise in self-discovery.

In the last two years I have devoted myself to reading mid-European books from the first half of the last century and it has been a rich seam to mine.  Antal Szerb is a new discovery to me but one of the most valuable.  No doubt my enjoyment of this book owes much to the excellent translation by Len Rix and his Afterword sets the book in a wider context and I am pleased to see that he agrees that irony, distinctively Middle-European in character operates on every level of this sophisticated and remarkable novel.  Although Mihaily’s actions are reprehensible, somehow our sympathies are never quite alienated – “some principle at the core of his being calls to us”.

So begins this labyrinthine tale of abandonment in a foreign city, every traveller’s nightmare, where nobody can recognise your language and your passport has been retained by your hotel, you have no baggage and only a limited supply of money.  Karinthy has made a wonderful job of describing what happened to Budai over the next few days, and the world he creates is sufficiently Kafka-esque for it to hit all the right buttons in the nightmare stakes.

The city Budai finds himself in is vastly over-crowded.  Budai is pushed and shoved every time he steps outside and returns from his exploratory expeditions bruised and aching.  The shops are full and endless queues form in cafeterias and shops.  Customers have to find what they want, then queue to pay for it and queue again to pick it up (echoes of Foyles bookshop in Charing Cross Road in times past).  It is the same in the hotel.  Budai is unable to make his problem known to the hotel staff owing to their knowledge of only their own language and as Budai makes sign language or draws little diagrams, the staff are already looking over his shoulder at the next customer.

Days pass, with the mystery of the location of the city and its strange language deepening all the time.  Budai resorts to assaulting a policeman in order to get arrested: at least that way someone will take notice of him and perhaps call for an interpreter. All that happens however is a brief encounter with a casual and brutish system which spits him out again as quickly as it took him in.

Budai tries to master the language, but it seems to be as difficult as decoding an ancient Egyptian text.  He steals a telephone directory, buys a book and collects leaflets in order to try to make sense of the language but this seems like one of those impossible tasks you are set in a dream, with the details hazy and fluid, and the solution just out of reach.  He manages to form a relationship with a young woman who operates the hotel lift.  She teaches him the number one to ten, but every day, the words seem to have changed, and Budai wonders whether there are different words for each number like the English zero, nought, “oh”, null.  Even her name seems to change slightly each day so he can never quite capture it in his notebook.

I found the story quite gripping and enjoyed the nightmarish aspects to it.  Anyone who travels to a foreign city knows something of the difficulty of making oneself known, and it is easy to relish the troubles that befall Budai when this is taken to excess.

There are some big themes here, the nature of language being the main one.  The people of the city seem to be afflicted with a Babelesque confusion of tongues.  The city is in the process of building a gigantic tower near the hotel, symptomatic perhaps of the confusion of tongues in the Genesis passage, “Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech”.  Linguistic understanding has become a free-flowing thing, more dependent on being the right sort of person rather than saying the right things.  Budai and the lift operator (Pepe, Bebe, Ébébe?) can barely exchange any thoughts at all, but when unexpectedly intimate one night, a free-flowing understanding is achieved for a brief hour or so.

Budai has certainly captured the atmosphere of the city very well.  It is a city gone wrong, where a population explosion has reduced everyone to just one rung above survival.  The inhabitants are short-tempered, impatient, intolerant of strangers and prone to low-level cruelty.  We see these tendencies in all cities but no city we know has descended to the point where every street is packed with people, and there is never a quiet time of day.  Budai’s attempts to find the outer boundaries of the city fail: even when he takes a Metro to the outermost station he only sees vistas of further urban sprawl stretching to the horizon.

I enjoyed this book but was also reminded of Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled in which an international composer arrives in a city to conduct a music festival and finds himself embroiled in endless diversions and encounters.  While Karinthy’s work lacks some of the psychological subtlety of Ishiguro’s book, it makes up for it in the perfectly drawn sense of panic Budai experiences as he realises the depths of his predicament.  Metropole deserves to be better known than it is.  It is a tremendously visual book in the power of the images it creates in the mind and as I read it, I couldn’t help but think that it could be turned into a fantastic film with the right direction and casting.