The Dispossessed

September 19, 2016
Hungarian essayist and poet Borbely’s first novel captures the pain of poverty and prejudice in post-World War II Hungary through the eyes of a young boy. The unnamed narrator is the son of a man with Jewish heritage and a woman with familial ties to the Kulaks, fascist sympathizers who once controlled Hungary before being overthrown by communists. Growing up in a small village in the late 1960s and early 1970s, he and his family are alienated by their fellow villagers and forced to live in near squalor. Though his life is defined by hunger and want, the boy uses his energy to learn about his heritage and Hungary’s violent history, including two wars and forced relocation. The boy’s voice is striking for the measured way in which he recounts violence, the material desires he and his sister hope to have filled, and the simple, bleak facts of his family’s existence. Through brief vignettes and stories told to him, the boy explains his world and the people who inhabit it, often weaving together mundane daily routines with illuminating details that highlight his family’s profound suffering. As the middle child of parents concerned with more pressing worries than his emotional needs , the cruelty of the boy’s life is at times overwhelming and deeply unsettling. This immensely powerful portrait of poverty is at once a window into an often obscured history, and a timeless testament to the struggle of those in need.

Starred review from September 15, 2016
In his first and only novel, Borbely describes growing up in a remote village in northeastern Hungary.Borbely, an acclaimed poet and writer in his native Hungary, once promised his father that he would never write about his dismal childhood. His father died in 2006. In 2013, Borbely published a brilliant, and biting, depiction of his destitute boyhood in a remote Hungarian village. The novel was highly acclaimed, and now, in his debut in English translation, Borbely's work promises to be a major gift to English readers. His is a massive talent, with a dark taste for the absurd placing him squarely in the company of Gogol, Kafka, and, more recently, Bohumil Hrabal and the filmmaker Emir Kusturica. In the 1960s and '70s, Communist years, Borbely's family was ostracized because of his mother's landowning ancestors and rumors of his father's illegitimacy. They were desperately poor. From a young boy's perspective, Borbely describes his father's chronic unemployment, his mother's ongoing attempts to fling herself down into the well. The boy, his older sister, and their baby brother sometimes went hungry. There weren't enough resources to support unnecessary life, and so, as Borbely writes in one unforgettable passage, "all newborn animals"--including sparrows, mice, and kittens--had to be "exterminated." Then the boy shifts his gaze. "We should take my little brother someplace, as well," he tells his mother. When she demurs, he pushes back. "But why was he brought here?" he insists. "There are enough of us already." In Mulzet's magnificent translation, Borbely's prose is caustic and lucent, tart and somehow burnished. He writes in short, staccato phrases that seem bitten off, chewed at the end with an acerbic twist. He has a fantastic wit; he excavates the darkest whimsy from the bleakest of situations. "But the angels sent him to us," his mother says of his baby brother. His response: "I don't understand what angels have to do with it." Borbely died in 2014, but there is a back catalog of poems, essays, and stories yet to appear in English. Here's hoping Mulzet brings us more before too much time passes. An exquisite addition to any library of the dark, the bleak, and the absurd, Borbely's inauguration into English is a magnificent one.

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October 15, 2016
Well-known poet Borbely uses his lyrical talent to illuminate the suffering and deep-seated poverty in a tiny Hungarian village in the 1960s, a time when politics and communism in the region changed difficult lives to impossible. The unnamed child narrator, whose drunken father is of Jewish descent and whose family is officially Greek Catholic (another unpopular religion in a Calvinist village), describes his life as a fearful outcast who, with his sister, does most of the chores and spends inordinate amounts of time keeping his mother from jumping into the well. The narrator doesn't shy away from the peasants' coarse humor, sexual aberrations, and cruelty to animals, nor the filth and excrement that surround them and serve as metaphors for their lives. While the short declarative sentences may seem somewhat repetitious, every page is laden with significance, and though some readers may not enjoy the education Borbely gives them, most will find much to ponder in this moving literary novel that compares favorably to both Elie Wiesel's Night (1960) and Philip Hensher's Scenes from Early Life (2013) for their disturbingly clear descriptions and autobiographical nature. Borbely died in 2014.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)