The Finno-Ugrian Vampire by Noémi Szécsi

Abstract

146 World Literature Today reviews In the hands of a master of hard sf like Greg Egan, so arcane a premise might succeed. In Suzuki’s, it doesn’t. One quickly realizes that the novel ’s “science”—incarnated in bits of technobabble like “In scientific terms, what will happen is the instantaneous scattering of all matter at a quantum level. All structure as we know it will be lost”—is wildly wonky. As in his previous novel, Kamigami No Promenade (2008; Eng. Promenade of the Gods, 2008), Suzuki undermines Edge with awkward prose, inconsistent characterization, and inept metaphors. He is irrepressibly redundant, repeating information as though writing for readers with ADD. Further potholes fill the narrative road: information dumps on a wild range of topics, including Japanese folklore, black holes, plate tectonics, the history of hieroglyphs, the origin of sight and the evolution of the eye, geomagnetism, antimatter , wormholes, sunspots, the demise of the dinosaurs, enough ancientcivilization mysteries to delight Erich von Däniken, and mathematics. Lots of mathematics. Still, Edge is worth reading for its insights into twenty-first-century Japanese attitudes toward apocalypse . These attitudes contrast strikingly with those in the (far superior ) 1973 novel Nippon Chinbotsu, by Komatsu Sakyō (pseud. Minoru Komatsu). This richly nuanced look at Japanese culture and psychology during what, for the nation, is the end of days, is available in English only in a truncated translation by Michael Gallagher (Japan Sinks, 1976). But it was effectively adapted by Shiro Moritan in his elegiac 1973 film, The Submersion of Japan. Michael A. Morrison University of Oklahoma Noémi Szécsi. The Finno-Ugrian Vampire. Peter Sherwood, tr. London. Stork Press. 2012. isbn 9780957132665 In the first paragraph of this “weretale for six actors, five voices, two players,” narrator Jerne Voltampere proffers fair warning: “Reader, do not doubt the truth of my words, for the tale I tell is a lie from beginning to end. It is often said that the only way to tell the truth is through telling lies. But in my view reality is wholly devoid of interest. Yet every word of this tale is true.” Thus begins the most innovative , trenchant vampire tale since Mati Unt’s Doonori meelespea (1990; Eng. Diary of a Blood Donor, 2008). But where Unt used the well-heeled motif of the vampire as a political metaphor for postcommunism in mid-1980s Estonia, Hungarian writer Noémi Szécsi appropriates the trope, which is not an element of Hungarian folklore, as a metaphor for a young person’s coming of age in modernday Budapest. (In its original Hungarian , Finnugor vámpír [2002], Szécsi exploited the lack of a grammatical gender in the Hungarian language to leave the reader in doubt as to whether Jerne is male or female—a masterstroke inevitably lost in this deft translation by Peter Sherwood.) Two engines drive this most unconventional bildungsroman: Jerne’s witty, sardonic narrative voice and “Grandma.” Separated by a gap of not merely generations but centuries, the two share a top-floor flat in a modern apartment building. Dead these last two hundred or so years, Grandma is guardian devil to her “trainee vampire.” While Jerne sees her as “a conscientious guardian who left no stone unturned to ensure that I become a well-educated corpse,” Grandma admits that “the essence of the matter is that deep down I’m a sadistic old woman.” She’s not kidding. In her day job, Jerne reads proof at a two-person publishing house owned by editor in chief Norma-Elektra and her husband, Ármin Jermák, a marginally dysfunctional vampire whom Jerne finds “as repulsive as spinach purée.” But what Jerne really wants to do is to write and publish animal stories for children about “Initiative, the bumptious but cowardly rabbit.” In realizing this goal, Jerne has a problem: being a force of darkness “insensible to goodness,” she is singularly ill-suited by experience or temperament to imbue her stories with suitable moral content. Commenting on Jerne’s first collection , Rotten Animals, Norma-Elektra nails the problem: “These rabbits, foxes, wolves, polecats, moles and Ma Yuan Ballad of the Himalayas: Stories of Tibet Herbert J. Batt, tr...