Bang Bang

The 6th and 7th books I read this year were both mystery novels, so I'm going to write about them jointly.

First, about A Maffia-klub by Karafiáth Orsolya. She is a well-known Hungarian contemporary poet, who has a reputation for being odd. For example, she often wears a wig and fancy dresses on TV. She is the member of an underground all-female band, who dress up in nightgowns, wear a horsehead mask, and do all kinds of weird things. I also heard in an interview that she has the nasty habit of calling up people in the middle of the night and make fun of them. In short, she enjoys being a weirdo, and being provocative, and she uses her personality to draw attention to contemporary art and poetry.

This was her first novel, published in 2008, after a period of depression and artistic crisis (I'm not sure if this expression is right). It was given me as a birthday present, but I might have read it anyway because I sort of liked her poetry, even though she's never been my favourite.

The story is kind of a mystery or a parody of a mystery. The protagonist is Ágota (named after Agatha Christie), a woman in her late twenties. She used to belong to a group called maffia-klub, which was a group of young women of about the same age, most of them doing the same major at the same college, namely studying to become a primary school teacher. There were twelve women altogether, some of them brought in by a friend or sister. The thirteenth member was Lajos, a mysterious guy, who was kind of a writer or artist or what. After college the girls don't meet again for years, but they keep getting strange emails from Lajos. Based on these letters Ágota starts to feel that Lajos is no longer alive. The letters are too peculiar even for Lajos, and they don't make sense as a collection. So, what she does is she revisits all the members of this club and tries to find out who the murderer is.

The book was advertised as a collection of the lyric confessions of twelve women, which is both true and false. In each chapter, Ágota meets one of the girls, and in the final one she meets all of them (as Poirot would do), except for Emese, who is dead by that time. True, in each chapter there is some kind of confession about Lajos, and it turns out that all of them have either been in love with him, loved by him, or his lover, some of them simultaneously with another girl. Many of them show some writer's aspirition, so we come to read novellas, letters, diary entries and what not. To tell the truth, there is more suspension in the story then actual plot. We get to read long chapters of these inserted writings, and they are all crazy for some reason. For example, if I'm not mistaken, out of the twelve women three mention having bald head once in her life. There's a scene about someone eating sausage with the plastic cover to make Lajos happy. There's a rather long and boring description of proper washing and peeling. There is mention of squeezing your loved one's pimples, and all kinds of crazy things. I suppose this is meant to be funny, but it is definitely not. Or is it meant to be absurd or grotesque?
You know, I kept reading this book, which was a great effort, and couldn't make out the head or tail of it. And frankly, I became impatient and uninterested in it. I wonder what literary critics had to say about it. For me, it was a disappointment.

The next book I read was utter pleasure and fun after Karafiáth's book, and a real mystery novel at that. I came upon Farewell, My Lovely by Raymond Chandler (from 1940, but of course a new issue) out of chance, in the English section of the library. I remembered Chandler being mention during one of my courses at university, claiming that he was the father of mystery novels, though perhaps not with such big words. Anyway, I heard others say its father was Poe, which sounds more valid to me. The thing is, Poirot, Sherlock Holmes, Miss Marple, and all the others might be the most briliant detectives on Earth, but they represent the European type of detectives, which is so much different from the American one.
Personally, I don't often read mytery novels, but I've seen a few good movies of the genre, you know, Dick Tracy and that stuff, and I just love this cool detective type who always has half a dozen wisecracks up his sleeves. According to the intro of this book, Chandler's second novel, he was the father of this type of private eyes, creating Philip Marlowe, who is indeed simply the best.
The story itself might not sound too creative, but it was a pleasure to read, and I could hardly put it down. Basically, there is some gorilla of a guy looking for his love of eight years before, a singer and dancer (described as "a cute redhead" in the book), called Velma. You know, this immediately reminded me of the protagonist of Chicago, Velma Kelly (played by Catherine Zeta-Jones). This is the kind of book in which rich dames and innocent young girls both fall for the handsome protagonist, who always ends up in trouble. There is always some mischief going on, and the guy runs into pistols and gorillas too often. And don't forget stupid cops and corrupted officials.
In short, you get what you pay for in such a book, and the best quality at that.