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George Konrád’s novel, The Case Worker, is a difficult read. Konrád’s prose is dense. Detail after detail is piled on, littered about, strewn over the page like the hyper-realist photography of Chuck Close – massive in size, yet it compresses information for the reader in such a way that the sheer humanity of the thing overwhelms. As we follow the narrator through his life as a caseworker dealing with abandoned children and runaway children with their myriad lives, the effect of Konrád’s hyperrealist prose is somehow overwhelming. The world is too awful and somehow too human. As his protagonist might declare, the examination of this world is “minutely but without effort” done in the same fashion that one might scan advertisements or a prisoner might examine the names carved into the wall of his cell. Konrad's prose is comfortable in its density.
Yet there is immense pity in Konrád’s prose and because it is pitiful, it is beautiful.
In his famed lecture on The Metamorphosis, Vladimir Nabokov said: “Where there is beauty there is pity for the simple reason that beauty must die: beauty always dies, the manner dies with the matter, the world dies with the individual.” Konrád is full of pity because he sees the beauty, the real, all-to-human beauty of “the other side,” (155).
Metamorphosis was on my mind – both the story by Kafka and the notion of transformation – while I read The Case Worker.
About midway through Konrád’s novel is a section aptly titled “Metamorphosis.” In this section, the narrator attempts to care for a child whose father, his last remaining caretaker, has just committed suicide. The child suffered trauma at birth and is mentally handicapped but physically able, often regarded as more of an animal than a human. The protagonist attempts to take care of the child, to mold him into something that would fit in with the standards of society but he is unable to effect any change. Instead, the protagonist finds himself morphing into Bandula, the father who committed suicide. The protagonist adapts his ways of thinking of being of acting of living. In this way, he finds the impossible beauty, the insurmountable struggle of “the other side” fated to die.
It is with this sensibility waving through the background of his prose that Konrád weaves his tale of this case worker, fated to his years of service and his Kafkaesque, comfortable life. But to achieve this sensibility, there are the details that compile and add this sort of hyperrealistic effect which, after a few pages, somehow overwhelms the reader in a flood of specificity, the emotional wash of which few sensitive readers would fully recover from.
Yet there is immense pity in Konrád’s prose and because it is pitiful, it is beautiful.
In his famed lecture on The Metamorphosis, Vladimir Nabokov said: “Where there is beauty there is pity for the simple reason that beauty must die: beauty always dies, the manner dies with the matter, the world dies with the individual.” Konrád is full of pity because he sees the beauty, the real, all-to-human beauty of “the other side,” (155).
Metamorphosis was on my mind – both the story by Kafka and the notion of transformation – while I read The Case Worker.
About midway through Konrád’s novel is a section aptly titled “Metamorphosis.” In this section, the narrator attempts to care for a child whose father, his last remaining caretaker, has just committed suicide. The child suffered trauma at birth and is mentally handicapped but physically able, often regarded as more of an animal than a human. The protagonist attempts to take care of the child, to mold him into something that would fit in with the standards of society but he is unable to effect any change. Instead, the protagonist finds himself morphing into Bandula, the father who committed suicide. The protagonist adapts his ways of thinking of being of acting of living. In this way, he finds the impossible beauty, the insurmountable struggle of “the other side” fated to die.
It is with this sensibility waving through the background of his prose that Konrád weaves his tale of this case worker, fated to his years of service and his Kafkaesque, comfortable life. But to achieve this sensibility, there are the details that compile and add this sort of hyperrealistic effect which, after a few pages, somehow overwhelms the reader in a flood of specificity, the emotional wash of which few sensitive readers would fully recover from.
“Let all the children come, the babies abandoned in hospitals and nurseries, in doctors’ offices and on strangers’ laps, on park benches and in garbage cans, the chilled, the urine-soaked, the withered babies left choking under pillows, rescued from gas-filled rooms crushed against the wall, thrown on the ground, abandoned amid broken glass and potato peelings; let them all come, our unbidden avenging enemies...” (169)
Toward the end of the novel, Konrád lists a series of people that the case worker has seen and will continue to see for the next twenty years – abandoned babies, runaways, abusers, delusional paranoids, eternal underdogs and many more make this list. Each category of person begins like the above, “let all the _____ come,” before ending with the note that one will talk, the other will listen, and “at least we shall be together,” (173).
The “at least” rings heavy, the final note of Konrád’s story, as though the rest of this pitiful world were so full of horror that all we might do to pass the time given to is share our fated misery. Yet somehow, there is beauty in sharing. And where there is beauty...
The “at least” rings heavy, the final note of Konrád’s story, as though the rest of this pitiful world were so full of horror that all we might do to pass the time given to is share our fated misery. Yet somehow, there is beauty in sharing. And where there is beauty...