The Loser by George Konrád

First published:A cinkos, 1980 (English translation, 1982)

Type of work: Psychological realism

Time of work: The 1980’s

Locale: Budapest and other areas in Hungary

Principal Characters:

• T, the narrator and protagonist, a Jewish Communist and a writer and scholar
• His Wife
• Dani, his brother
• Teri, Dani’s girlfriend

The Novel

The Loser begins and ends in the Hungary of the 1980’s, when the revolutionary fervor of the Hungarian Communists, who had welcomed the Russians as liberators both from the older hierarchical regime and from the Nazis, has been replaced by disillusionment. The narrator, known only as T, who is upper-class by birth but a Communist by conviction, has spent much of his life in forced labor camps, in military service, or in prison. Always somewhat alienated because he is Jewish, always suspect because of his intellectual independence, in his later years he has been confined in a mental institution.

In the first section of the novel, T describes life in the asylum, which becomes a metaphor for life under Communist rule, where, as he says to the director, the people presumed to be insane are actually permitted more freedom of thought and speech than anyone else. At the end of the section, T is released; with his marriage destroyed and his career in suspension, however, he has little interest in life.

The next three sections of the novel trace the narrator’s history in chronological order. The second section begins with T’s farewell to his younger brother Dani, who is leaving that night for the West. Dani, an energetic, irrational young man with a dangerous appetite for excitement, says that he no longer trusts himself with his temperamental, whorish girlfriend, Teri, who is as destructive and untrustworthy as the present political system. If he cannot free himself from the system and from her, Dani says, he may kill either Teri or himself.

After Dani leaves, T recalls his youth: the prosperous, secure environment in which he grew up; his kindly shopkeeper grandfather whose honesty and charity denied the usual assumptions about greedy, bourgeois Jews; his lusty, devoted grandmother. He remembers his delicate mother and roistering father, the nursemaid and the young aunt who initiated him into sexuality, and other characters who were part of a world which seemed destined to endure forever.

In section 3, T relives the collapse of that world. First comes World War II and Fascist domination. Perhaps T’s detachment from life begins with the torture of his mistress, Sophie. He likes to think that it is his loyalty to the other Communists which keeps him from talking and thereby saving her, but perhaps he is only indifferent. At any rate, she is sacrificed and dies at Auschwitz, uselessly, since their comrades are betrayed in any case. During their sufferings, however, the Hungarian Communists dream of revolution and of rescue by their Russian comrades. Thus the narrator escapes from forced labor for the Fascists to fight with the partisans, then flees to the Russian lines. There he is shocked to find that the Russian Communists have no sense of brotherhood with the Hungarian Communists. In the months which follow, T is recaptured by the Germans and then taken by the Russians, who use him to persuade Hungarian soldiers to surrender. Bitterly, he comments on his later sense of guilt, when those trusting Hungarians return to their country only after ten years in the labor camps of the Russians, who had called them to be comrades.

The fourth section of the novel deals with T’s gradual disillusionment with the ideals for which he has worked and fought. When Budapest is “liberated” in 1945, the Communists expect a state ruled by poets and scholars, with free speech, a free press, and an enlightened society. Instead, there is repression. Yearning for the freedom which has been their dream, the Hungarians rise up in 1956 but are defeated by Russian tanks. Once again, T goes to prison, but this time the repressive society is a Communist state. At this point, T seems to have two choices: to leave Hungary for the West or to toady to the authorities by producing noncontroversial research—playing the academic game but actually abandoning both the search for truth and the expression of his own opinion. Like George Konrád himself, however, he chooses rather to stay in Eastern Europe, where he has invested so much of his life, circulating his writings privately and accepting the periodic knock on the door, the house search, the prison term.

The final part of the novel focuses on T’s relationships with the two most important people in his life, his wife and his brother. For two decades, the relationship with his wife has withstood uncertainty and separation. Finally, however, after his confinement in the asylum, T finds that his desire for solitude is stronger than his love for his wife. As he withdraws from intimacy, she finds someone else and the marriage disintegrates. Dani’s relationship with his own girlfriend, Teri, is also unsatisfactory. Just after T has decided to return to the asylum, which he prefers to outside society, he learns that Dani has killed Teri and is being hunted for murder. Returning once again to action, rather than detachment, the narrator finds his brother and helps him to hang himself.

The Characters

T and the other Hungarian Communists, like Konrád himself, had hoped for a new freedom which would enable people of all classes to assert their individual wills, as T’s prosperous parents and grandparents, and others of their class, had been able to do in a hierarchical society. They were disillusioned to discover that the Communist society in practice allowed freedom to no one. The characters in this novel are divided between those who insist on being themselves, even in a repressive society, and those who submerge their personalities and structure their utterances, even their thoughts, in order to seem like everyone else.

T is by nature an intellectual, a person who examines every event and every theory in the light of reason. His willingness to envision change makes him a revolutionary; when the new society develops, however, based on unthinking acceptance of simplistic theories and the practice based upon them, T has no place in it. Throughout the novel, T contrasts himself with those who choose not to question, such as the director of the asylum, and the academics who would teach him how to succeed without doing any significant thinking. T cannot surrender his mind, even to preserve his physical self. Unfortunately, as he lives more and more in the mind, he loses the capacity to live in the heart, and thus his marriage is the final sacrifice to a society that has driven its brightest members into conformity or into themselves.

T’s wife is a bright, outgoing person who is similarly stunted. Generous and imaginative, she cannot be at ease in a society where secretiveness is a necessity. When T can no longer reach out to her or to anyone else, she finds a young lover and abandons the effort to reach her husband.

Dani, T’s untrustworthy younger brother, has been both a revolutionary and an informer, just as he has been both the lover and, finally, the murderer of his beloved. Adventuresome, emotional, unstable, he seems to court death as the final adventure. Needing freedom as much as his older brother needs it, he responds to deprivation with violence. When he learns that Teri has informed on him in order to prevent his leaving the country, he knows himself to be imprisoned by her and by his society. He had predicted that if he did not make it to the West and freedom, he would explode. He does, murdering Teri and then killing himself.

The other characters in the novel are presented through T’s eyes as well as through their own words and actions but appear and depart as he recounts his life story. Sometimes, like the Cossack of World War II, the character will reappear in order to reveal his fate. The Cossack, unlike T, is a successful adapter. Twenty years after his initial encounter with T, he is a successful Soviet politician. When he encounters the protagonist once again, it is to define freedom, which, he says, is the ability to lie in bed, drink vodka, and chase women, while convincing everyone that you are superior. Such characters as the director of the asylum, the Cossack, the lieutenant colonel who conducts the house search, and the brand bank manager, whom T sees as a double at the end of the story, cannot understand those who refuse to conform to society’s demands. Thus they provide a significant contrast to the individualists: the narrator, his wife, and his brother.

Critical Context

With the publication of A latogato (1969; The Case Worker, 1974), Konrád was recognized in Hungary as an outstanding writer. A varosalapito (1977; The City Builder, 1977) and The Loser, which are clearer attacks on the repressive system into which Communism has evolved, were circulated by the process called samizdat (self-publishing, or private circulation), while being officially published outside Hungary. With each book, Konrád’s reputation has grown; yet each book has its strengths and its weaknesses.

The Case Worker is a poignant and universal story of a social worker’s involvement with a defective child, whose parents were driven to suicide by their hopeless situation. The book was praised because of its effectiveness within its narrow focus. On the other hand, The City Builder is far more diffuse, lacking a forward-moving plot and seeming to some critics to be simply an exploration of the consciousness of the protagonist, a city planner who has become disillusioned as the dream of progress deteriorates into a fearful and stagnant bureaucracy. Although Konrád’s descriptive passages have always been admired, in The City Builder there seems to be no development in plot or character to relate those vivid passages. With The Loser, Konrád combines the development of The Case Worker with the scope of The City Builder to produce a gripping novel.

In all of his works, as the critics have pointed out, consciousness is primary. The world is seen through the eyes of a single narrator, who is also the protagonist. An educated, sensitive person with an intellectual’s capacity for independent thought, the narrator can relate events to the movements of history as well as to his own experience. It is interesting that, as the works progress, the narrator seems to become more detached, even from his own emotions. In critical response to The Loser, there has been some disagreement as to whether T’s aloofness is meant to represent a personal reaction or the final destruction of any self in the repressive state. There is also disagreement as to whether the protagonist is a sympathetic figure or a satirical target. In any case, the clear structure of the novel leaves no confusion about the events which shape the protagonist. That his character is complex enough to cause such critical discussion may be an indication of Konrád’s mastery of his form.

Bibliography

Blake, Patricia. Review in Time. CXXI (January 17, 1983), p. 70.

Koger, Grove. Review in Library Journal. CVII (September 15, 1982), p. 1769.

Los Angeles Times Book Review. October 17, 1982, p. 1.

The New York Times Book Review. LXXXVII, September 26, 1982, p. 1.

Publishers Weekly. Review. CCXXII (August 6, 1982), p. 58.

Sennett, Richard. Review in The New York Times Book Review. LXXXVII (September 26, 1982), p. 1.

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

West Coast Review of Books. VIII, November, 1982, p. 43.