#V4books: Our Street by Sándor Tar

The novel is set in one of the many forlorn corners of the Hungarian post-1990 countryside, namely Crooked Street, which is at the tail-end of a village. That being said, the exact location is of no consequence, exemplified by the lack of numbers on the houses and further hinting at the fact that no strangers would happen upon the place by chance.

At first sight, one would think that Our Street is yet another chapter in the long history of Hungarian sociographic writing: a close-up on rural deprivation, on people pressed to the margins of a stagnating society and caught somewhere between the sad and the absurd. However, Tar has an unexpected and refreshing voice and a stronger loyalty to his material than to any literary school.

The thirty-one vignettes that constitute the text are portraits juxtaposed against one another, spelling out the daily dread of the street’s inhabitants. Each story looks at the shared-but-separate lives from varying angles. They open onto one another like a kaleidoscope of neighbouring windows. Here, people’s lives are intertwined and yet always lonely, and this apartness is so mundane that it shocks the reader only rarely—a few sharp sentences here, a moment of pain there.

An illustration of this comes from a court scene during a divorce proceeding where a man and his wife argue over the last time they had sex. The woman is up in arms saying the last time did not count because it was rape. Another instance involves a sick father who has, for years, not been touched for fear of infection. As it turns out, he died from cancer rather than the presumed tuberculosis. After the pub owner gets drunk with the priest, who visits him in the middle of the night lost and restless, he charges the priest for the drinks, just not immediately. After all, they are friends.

The chapters follow a spatial rather than a temporal sequence: time progresses slowly, if at all, circling around the same fragments of events. The characters are distinct, but eventually their faces fade into a shared isolation and hopelessness. Lives as dead-end streets might not be the most inventive motif, but Tar takes his metaphors seriously, and follows them through.

Although readers may find thematic similarities with László Krasznahorkai’s dystopian villages, Ádám Bodor’s countryside, or Szilárd Borbély’s anatomies of violence — to mention a few contemporary Hungarian examples — it is the unique behaviours and personalities Tar presents which display his originality. His figures do not feel like stock characters; rather, they maintain their individuality thanks to a tone that is careful to avoid tragedy, satire, or sentimentalism.