Tompa Home

1. Auflage 2024
ISBN: 978-1-912545-45-2
Verlag: Istros Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 362 Seiten

Prompted by a class reunion, Home deals with the experience of homecoming after extended absence and engages with the archaeology of the self in the context of estrangement and belonging. Having taken the decision to emigrate decades earlier, Tompa's unnamed protagonist is caught between two worlds, navigating a journey from one homeland to another, and suddenly facing an upsurge of revelations that have a strong emotional impact.

Andrea Tompa is a Hungarian writer born in Romania in 1971. She studied Russian literature in Budapest, Hungary, worked as a theatre critic and editor, and lectures on performing arts. She has published four novels. The Hangman's House (Seagull Books), in Bernard Adam's translation, was nominated for the 2022 Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize. She lives in Budapest.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Tompa, Andrea

Weitere Mitwirkende

Komporaly, Jozefina

Leseproben

Starting Out   The landscape appears out of focus, with no clear outlines and solid forms. Its edges are dissolving; parts are fading into one another. The view is fuzzy, blurred, details are impossible to make out, only vast unities are visible to the naked eye. A grey cube-­shaped building, myriads of parked cars in every colour, the sky smeared with clouds, on the horizon, an arc of trees or perhaps a forest. Our protagonist is contemplating the landscape through the lense of reading glasses, from behind the steering wheel. The low, windowless cube is a shopping centre with a huge car park, while further away, there’s a bleak airport. The grimness is softened by being viewed through glasses. There is no vanishing point, no sharp lines, no perspective. Sky and land merge together on the horizon, without conveying a sense of depth. Even the light is more muted. Heading into the sun has lost its charm. This airport is the grimmest place our protagonist has ever seen, but the plus lenses in her glasses makes even concrete and metal appear somewhat softer. This time, it isn’t her turn to fly, only to wait for someone, which brings a sense of relief. Where’s that former self who was so keen on airports? When did this change? Is it possible to have seen enough, once and for all? There was a time when just standing there, waiting, tied to a spot, would have seemed impossible – the very act of stopping would have been a sign of defeat. When did that former passion for travel vanish? Even this present journey was a torture. Where’s the person who used to grab every single opportunity to get going, keen to take possession of the whole wide world? Where’s that inner Hannibal who crosses the Alps in a snowstorm, just as Turner painted it, commemorating the dark stormy sky, menacing like a wave, and the cascading avalanche, rather than the minor historical hero: Turner knew how we must always struggle with landscape, and not with people and foreign tribes. In the distance, there’s sunshine and the promising warm lights of Rome, while at the forefront, Hannibal fights the elements by way of a snowstorm. These two contrasting weathers perhaps can’t even co-­exist in actual time and in such proximity, in a shared moment, that is to say in the so-­called ‘real’, but only in the painter’s dreams. What has our protagonist gained or conquered while going round the world? In the autumn, there’ll be another flight to undertake though. Wouldn’t it be somehow possible to just get there without embarking on an actual journey? When agreeing to this prospective travel to a small Northern town, barely traceable on the map, the unknown landscape and foreign climate had some mysterious lure. The invitation was to attend a conference called A guest in your country. They had discussed the meaning of the title at length, and what the person who formulated this phrase might have had in mind. ‘Does this mean that you invited immigrants?’ was the prospective speaker’s abrupt response. ‘Oh, no, not at all…’ the reassuring elderly man of letters who organised the event hastened to reply and then attended to all subsequent questions, such as ‘Why me?, Why me in particular?’, aimed at ensuring that it wasn’t some misunderstanding that led to our protagonist’s irrevocable presence as a non-­guest, a victim of an error, who had arrived at a new homeland and was now an eternal winner. In their correspondence, that commenced the previous winter, the Finnish organiser kept to a slow pace, adopting a relaxed tempo despite the promise around this little low pro?le conference. Perhaps the Northern light could illuminate things anew. Besides, two editors had recommended our protagonist, a writer, for the guest in your country topic, so she too ended up responding at a slow pace, confirming that the term guest, or ????? was indeed correct, in response to which the cheerful Finnish organiser immediately prided himself with speaking some Russian. Funny how the English as well as the Russian word is also used to refer to the host, she thought: wouldn’t that constitute a great conference topic for a linguist? How is it possible for both the guest and the host to be one and the same? However, after a bit of research, it emerged that the term hostis was in fact referring to the ‘enemy’. Does this mean that guests are enemies? This realisation made her give up on the unwarranted peeling back of words in correspondence, aware of her own deficit in the field. Perhaps it would be best not to get to the bottom of words because at the bottom of things there are unimaginable vortexes that can pull you in. Still, as the imminent journey and the presentation for the Fin­nish event approached, it conjured up the memory of a talk she was invited to attend in which Anne Bogart, a tall and well-­built American director, suggested that one should either get really close to things or contemplate them from a distance. Perhaps Bogart meant that from close-­up, details, complex structures, unresolvable correlations and intricate systems are visible to the naked eye, while from a distance, one can sense the greater picture for a split second, akin to the moment when giant cyclops lift their heavy heads and take a look around. What’s in-­between? The medium view is basically nothing, grey death, where everything is reassuringly familiar and knowable. Yet the Finns, or to be precise this easy-­going elderly gentleman by the name of Mikko, who calls himself a philosopher, tend to just go on holiday for two to three weeks. Mikko mentioned this in his latest letter, in which he also gave ample details about the various berries that were in season up North and the particular kinds he’d be harvesting in that distant forest where there were hardly any inhabitants left because they had all moved away to the nearby towns. The two of them continued to exchange long letters in which the little conference no longer got a mention. As the Finnish philosopher, literary scholar, translator and berry-­expert noted, he was spending a lot of time in the woods, being a regular guest of these forests. He even rounded off one of his letters by stating that although he wasn’t a writer as such, he could pen a book about berries and might actually proceed with this plan one day. He also shared his difficulties with translating the names of Finnish berries into English, and that he’d never agree to simply using the same English term, even as a compound, for the multiple words available in his mother tongue for the many different kinds of fruit ranging from black to red and blue varieties: ‘How could anyone translate anything in such circumstances? Berries don’t migrate, do they?’ As it happens, the Finnish gentleman wasn’t interested in a ‘tailored response’, not a personal perspective, and would leave it up to the panellists to decide what to say about the topic. ‘Well, we are all guests in this world, aren’t we?’ he brought his letter to a close reassuringly, continuing on this persuasive tone even though the invitation had long been accepted. ‘By the way, there won’t be a large audience in this small town for our little conference, so there’s no need to worry about too much publicity.’ This is as inviting as it gets, she concluded and purchased her flight tickets. Still, the presentation needed preparing, with the trip and the menacing flight suddenly pressing two months ahead of schedule. The distant unknown place suddenly became attractive, but the topic still rather repelling and besides, there were no suitable words to describe it anyway. The presentation that needs writing for the conference, summed up by the organiser as ‘just a small comment you could give’, suddenly grips her on the left shoulder, like any other missed task, and turns into a stiff muscle-­knot, a nodule, a painful bundle that makes even her neck dead stiff. Fortunately, the talk will be in English. It’s reassuring to avoid the traps of one’s mother tongue, with its exceedingly complicated twists and endless ramifications. Instead, there’s an opportunity to proceed in English, as if navigating a safer and less busy dual carriageway, where things can be named a lot easier because they already have names in foreign languages. No need to be afraid, foreignness is a safe shield. A major language is a particularly solid defence, great to lean against, and in the light of which it’s comforting to bask. In summary, she bought the said plane ticket. Yet, while waiting in the vicinity of the airport and surveying the washed-­out building through reading glasses, this now feels like a mistake. To hell with flights. To top it all, this time it’s her turn to take other passengers and do the driving in the wake of a successfully passed test. If only it could be over already, if only this class reunion were cancelled, and the world had come to an end… She can’t really recall when this journey ended up resembling a frightful final separation, a small death, and hence needing to be avoided. Life, a writer’s life, doesn’t consist of shifts and turns but of periodic swerves rather than fateful steps, as mountaineers also slip out of their harnesses and ropes, they slip off their path because there is no actual demarcated path and, more specifically, there is no goal. Perhaps this is the biggest problem, the lack of a dedicated path, as there are only actions...