Böcker av Ferenc Barnas

A lecturer's descent into psychological chaos unfolds against the turbulent backdrop of 1990s Budapest. In Other Death, we are thrown into the chaotic life of a forty-year-old university lecturer who is experiencing a sudden, complete psychological and existential breakdown. Afternoons disappear and years chop and change in confusion as he wanders the streets searching for work. Homelessness, alcoholism, and hate are on the rise in 1990s Budapest as symptoms of the regime change. Images flash up from other lives: a Boer pointing a shotgun in Johannesburg, bodies heaped up in the downtown area, a Volkswagen campervan parked by an empty phone box in Switzerland. As he encounters new and historic traumas embedded in the lives and the buildings around him, the unnamed narrator struggles to grasp any coherent identity. It's only when he starts to work as a gallery attendant, observing the interactions between viewer and artwork, light and space, that he embarks on the slow healing routine towards clarity. In Barnás's semi-autobiographical novel, meditations on trauma and urban space, image and observation, and spiritual friendships echo the writings of W. G. Sebald and Thomas Bernhard. Like Vertigo meets The Bell Jar, the magnetic language of Other Death draws the reader into the murky workings of a mind severely afflicted.

Marked by powerful and evocative prose, Ferenc Barnás‿s novel tells the fascinating story of a young man‿s journey through his strange obsessions towards possible recovery. The unnamed narrator is the parasite, feeding off others‿ ailments, but he is also a host who attracts people with the most peculiar manias. He confesses, almost amiably, his decadent attraction as a young adolescent to illnesses and hospitals. The real descent into his private, hallucinatory hell begins after his first sexual encounter; he becomes a compulsive masturbator, and then a compulsive fornicator. But to his horror, he realizes that casual sex is not casual at all for him‿each one-night stand results in insane jealousy: he imagines previous lovers hovering over him every time he makes love to a woman.   When he gets to know a woman referred to as L., he thinks his demons may have finally subsided. But when he hears of her past, the jealousy returns. He seeks relief through writing‿by weaving an imagined tale of L.‿s amorous adventures. What will he do with this strange manuscript, and can it bring him healing? A breathtaking blend of Dostoevskian visions, episodes of madness, and intellectual fervor, all delivered in precise, lucid prose, The Parasite is a novel that one cannot escape. Â