The Dispossessed by Szilárd Borbély

The Dispossessed by Szilárd Borbély

Originally published: 2013
Acquired: November 2016
Read: August 2024

Back when I was adjuncting after graduate school, I got sent a complimentary copy of this book by the publisher, asking if I would consider teaching it. It's an English translation of a post-WWII Hungarian novel, so it is pretty unlikely to ever fit into any course I teach. But it looked interesting enough to read, so I bunged it onto my reading list, and almost eight years later, it finally popped up. (The book appears to be out of print in the U.S. now, so I couldn't assign it if I wanted to.)

It's less a novel with a clear overarching trajectory and more a series of vignettes running two to four pages in most cases, chronicling a young boy growing up in Communist Hungary in an impoverished family constantly being pushed to the outside of its society, and forced to undergo a sequence of traumatic setbacks. There seems to be a roughly chronological order to it all, but the book definitely jumps around a lot timewise. A friend asked me about it, and I told her, "It starts depressing and gets worse." There are some striking individual vignettes, but it never really grabbed me. Too depressing? Too bitty? Too repetitive? Too little interiority? Probably a bit from all four columns, to be honest. I don't mind long depressing arcs (Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks is one of my faves), but this one didn't do it for me.