The City Builder by George Konrád

First published:A varosalapito, 1977 (English translation, 1977)

Type of work: Psychological realism

Time of work: The 1970’s

Locale: An unnamed provincial city in Hungary

Principal Characters:

• The Narrator, a city planner
• His dead Wife
• His Son, who may be dead

The Novel

The City Builder is a stream-of-consciousness novel, narrated in the present tense, which explores the mind of a Hungarian city planner who has become disillusioned with his stagnant, bureaucratic, and repressive society. Each of the ten chapters has a central preoccupation and is further unified by the settings, characters, and symbolic patterns which are emphasized.

As the novel begins, the narrator is an airline passenger, resolving to withdraw into himself in order to avoid disturbing the fragile peace in the city where he will land. Yet his apartment, which should have been a haven, reminds him of the failures of his life: the ideal city, which was never realized because of bureaucratic corruption; the ideal marriage, which perished when his beloved wife was killed in a senseless car accident; the ideal son, whose own soul and body were damaged when he was thrown into prison and who at the end of the book may well have died in the earthquake which has destroyed the town.

In the second chapter, the airplane setting changes to a train, and the narrator thinks back to the waves of conquest which have swept across Eastern Europe from time to time as the train now moves across the land. The Romans, the Tartars, the Austrians, the Nazis have come and gone, leaving generation after generation of Hungarians to bury their dead, to rebuild the cities, and to begin living again.

Even times which seemed secure have been subject to sudden change. The house of the narrator’s grandfather, on the family estate, appeared secure, and the hierarchical way of life, of which the narrator believes he must disapprove, offered a kind of solidity. Yet time brought industrialization and pollution in the form of a power plant built by the narrator’s own father.

Recalling the birth of his son, the narrator mourns for another lost dream. Idealistic, philosophical, intense, the son fell afoul of the state. After three months in prison, he emerged broken in health and will. Meanwhile, the narrator’s wife had been killed in an automobile accident, leaving only the bittersweet memories of their relationship, with which he must live. Among his memories, too, are those of his own parents when they were young: the lovely mother who had become an old woman when the narrator returned after being a prisoner of war, and the strong father, himself a private builder, defeated by death.

As he searches for something stable in life, the narrator questions God, in a segment reminiscent of Job, except that God does not answer his questions, even with the biblical insistence on his own existence.

At the end of the novel, the city planner is once again in motion, moving first on a ship through an idyllic holiday landscape, then shockingly through a city devastated by an earthquake, into which the military move, this time to rescue, not to subdue. Finally, it is a frozen winter night, New Year’s Eve. The narrator is once again alone. God, he says, has been invited to join them, but has not appeared. Cut off from faith, he wishes to lose his loneliness at least in kinship to the people of his city. Remembering the bloody cruelty of his people, the whimsical condemnations of “enemies” whose only crime was to be different or irritating, the narrator tries, nevertheless, at the beginning of the New Year, to embrace them. The city is celebrating. Everyone seems free. Yet the narrator realizes that this brief respite from hate and oppression will end with the next dawn. The saving revolution has been an illusion.

The Characters

Since the characters of The City Builder are seen through the eyes of the narrator, they reveal as much about him as about themselves. His grandfather, his mother, and his father, for example, all belong to a childhood of prosperity and security, of pleasure and joy. After he describes the autocratic grandfather, the important father, the passionate and beautiful mother, the narrator adds that he did not like their kind of life because it was founded on pride. Yet his description of that life indicates that his own memories are happy. The narrator’s father, for example, is a lusty, gossipy, hot-tempered man, given to snatching at the maid, shouting at his son, and conversing with God as his equal. Certainly the bloated capitalist of propaganda, in the narrator’s reminiscences he is infinitely preferable to the slavish officeholders of the new society, who are so busy protecting themselves that they accomplish nothing. Thus the narrator’s own assessments of such capitalists, of whom he does not approve, are belied by the tone of his descriptions.

The narrator’s most-admired women, like his father, are lusty and free-spirited. Acknowledging the peccadilloes of her husband, the narrator’s mother obviously was delighted by him. The narrator details her sexual joy in her husband, a joy much like that of his own dead wife, whose sensuality, forever lost to him, is a constant torment. Both of them share the glitter of the long-dead lady who is described in the third chapter, jumping her stallion, dancing through life decorated with diamonds and furs, attended by colonels. Such individualists are not heroines of the collective.

Nor is the narrator’s son at home in the society which he describes. From his childhood a questioner, he accuses his father of having too much faith in technocracy, too little interest in human individuality. Perhaps, thinks the narrator, he took pleasure in his son’s inevitable fall. A dreamer, a theatrical promoter, a man who spoke his mind, the son was imprisoned because he refused to mouth the cliches of his state. To repression, he reacted with violence. Now hospitalized, he has returned to childhood, to begin again at twenty-two. The narrator examines his own feelings as he tells the story. Did he wish for his own argumentative son’s downfall? Was the boy too much of a threat to his own hard-won assumptions? Or did he try to protect him too much? An intellectual, a natural skeptic, the son was honest with himself, and such honesty, broods the father, must end either in destruction or in a willingness to lie, to live the kind of life which the narrator has been willing to live.

Through the narrator’s reactions to his own characters, through his sympathy with those who demand so much of life and of society, George Konrád suggests that the story of this novel is the narrator’s examination of his own beliefs. His apartment, he says, is strewn with his own failures. In the light of those other lives, vibrant though doomed to disaster or death, the narrator is obviously having second thoughts about his own.

Critical Context

The justice of George Konrád’s indictment of his Communist Hungary is evidenced by the fact that only his first book, A latogato (1969; The Case Worker, 1974), was printed in Hungary and that despite his growing international reputation only that work is mentioned in contemporary Hungarian literary histories. Budapest bookstores do not stock any of Konrád’s works. Obviously they must be circulated privately, for intellectuals who will not discuss them are clearly familiar with them.

The Case Worker evidently did not offend the authorities because it did not seem to criticize the system, but instead expressed the frustration of a juvenile welfare worker whose acceptance of the realities of slum life is challenged by his feelings of responsibility for a five-year-old retarded child, whose parents have committed suicide. Even though The Case Worker denies the easy official optimism of Communism and points out the fact that society has no real answers for such problems, it does not focus on the shortcomings of the system, as do Konrád’s later works.

While The City Builder lacks the unity which was provided by the earlier novel’s focus on the relationship between two individuals and on one immediate problem, substituting the relationships between the narrator and his city, his parents and grandparents, his wife and his son, for a single, clearer line of development, it is a memorable book, primarily for moving scenes, such as those of the flood and of the earthquake, and for clearly realized characters, such as the father, the wife, and the son. In the book which followed The City Builder, A cinkos (1980; The Loser, 1982), Konrád moves from the essaylike technique, which can lose the reader, to more careful plotting and therefore to a stunning effect. As he has developed, it is clear that Konrád is one of the most important voices from contemporary Eastern Europe.

Bibliography

Kessler, Jascha. Review in The New York Times Book Review. LXXXIII (January 22, 1978), pp. 13, 21.

Lardner, Susan. Review in The New Yorker. LIV (April 10, 1978), pp. 141-143.

Sanders, Ivan. “Freedom’s Captives: Notes on George Konrád’s Novels,” in World Literature Today. LVII (Spring, 1983), pp. 210-214.

Sanders, Ivan. “Human Dialogues Are Born,” in The Nation. CCIV (April 23, 1977), pp. 504-506.

Solataroff, Ted. “The Weight of History,” in The New Republic. CLXXXVIII (February 14, 1983), pp. 28-33.