AGAINST TYRANNY, FROM A TO Z | May 20th 2008

Doris Poklekowski

It's been ten years since Zilahy's "The Last Window-Giraffe" was first published. It continues to be a rare and colourful read but, James Woodall wonders, where's the sequel?

Special to MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE

At first glance,  Péter Zilahy's "The Last Window-Giraffe" is hard to pin down. The title evokes some genre-busting surrealist fantasy. Based on a Soviet-era Hungarian literacy manual, the volume's subheading--"A Picture Dictionary for the Over Fives"--confirms this oddness. A mix of Lewis Carroll and Borges, perhaps?

In fact this thin and eccentric book, attention-getting in its bright orange dust-jacket, is an absorbing blend of Middle-European angst, Monty Python and "Tristram Shandy". Set in mid-1990s Belgrade, it is structured like a child's A to Z: "ablak" means window in Hungarian, "zsiráf" is giraffe. But it is not for children.

The text, in double columns on each page, emerges as a series of alphabetically ordered, encyclopaedia-like entries. Many of them are meditations, sayings or apercus--"Fog is a cloud that is very close to the Earth. When we walk in fog, we are really walking in clouds". Cartoon figures, usually engaged in sports, gambol across many of the 120 pages. Then there are Zilahy's photos, which include striking colour shots of police in riot gear.

But the most substantial passages comprise eyewitness reports of the demise of east European communism. Though fragmented and slightly batty at times, "The Last Window-Giraffe" reveals Zilahy's gift for zesty juxtapositions of past and present:

"Our Magyar ancestors, so it is said, once went out to hunt a stag but bumped into some women and settled down instead. Where would they have ended up if they had continued the chase? The Belgrade correspondents are bored to death. God! says the Der Spiegel reporter in the Hotel Moscow café, another day of demos. Nothing's actually happening--no mass shootings, no Party secretaries jumping off balconies..."

"In communist times, there really was a book called 'Window-Giraffe'," Zilahy explained to me. We were at a bar in Berlin called Ständige Vertretung. "We were treated like children. So I decided to pay tribute to this era by reproducing a book which underlined how controlled we all were. It revisits the region's last dictatorship, just as it began to disappear."

The book was first published in Zilahy's native Hungary ten years ago, where it sold 10,000 copies. It has since been translated into 18 other languages, and editions have proliferated around the world. A Ukrainian student recently wrote the author to say the book helped inspire activists during Kiev's Orange Revolution of 2004

Zilahy was inspired to write the book after he spent the winter of 1996-7 in Belgrade. At 26, he mucked in with the anti-Milosevic streetfighters, police taunters and rotten-egg throwers, participating in the demonstrations that marked the beginning of the end for the Serbian dictator. "I wanted to experience my own 1956," Zilahy said, referring to Hungary's revolution against Stalinist rule. He yearned for the "thrill of revolt against tyranny," and hoped that this resistance would prove more successful than the Hungarian effort over 50 years ago. "I felt shut out of history and saw this as too good an opportunity to miss."

He wrote "The Last Window-Giraffe" soon after, and has spent the last ten years promoting and enjoying its multilingual success. On May 10th he went on the BBC's "The Ticket" to promote a newly released English version by Anthem Press.

Critics strain to categorise and compare the book. While Ambrose Bierce's "The Devil's Dictionary" or possibly Borges's "The Book of Imaginary Beings" sometimes come to mind, one reviewer at London's Independent compared Zilahy to W.G. Sebald. The late German memoirist, best-known for "The Emigrants" (1996), also wrote meandering, evocative narratives that include pictures. But this parallel vexes Zilahy: "I'm nothing like Sebald. I'm much funnier!"

Maybe so, but not as prolific. Before his sudden death at 57 in 2001, Sebald completed four novels in ten years; Zilahy has yet to publish a second book.

"I wish he'd write something new," said Julian Evans recently. A British writer and broadcaster, Evans interviewed Zilahy for BBC radio when the book first came out. "This particular way of looking at Central Europe will, I think, be longer-lasting than many other experiments in writing from the region," he observed. "But Péter should consider what it is he wants to be. Being a literary star is one thing, but does he really want to be a novelist?"

Time is on Zilahy's side. With the revolutions of eastern Europe apparently over, Zilahy is considering a few new fiction projects. But he still travels, restlessly--Serbia one week, Budapest the next, London after that. Perhaps he is collecting impressions and stories and momentum. But as any novelist knows, constant motion never aids the birth of that most monstrous of babies: the second novel.

(James Woodall is a writer based in Berlin. He last wrote about Martin Scorcese's film "Shine A Light". )