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"Café Lukacs" or the Return of the genre noir to Greece with "Hungarian ticket"

11 February 2010 / 12:02:03  GRReporter
9378 reads

Zdravka Michailova 

Exclusively for GRReporter 

The short novel Café Lukacs (Agra Publishers, 2008) by Kostas Kalfopoulos grabs some readers with the charm of the city where the events unfold: Budapest, with its unique atmosphere of an outdoor museum. For others, its magnetic effect lies in its roman noir plot (moreover, the subheading of the book is Budapest noir). The book is only 120 small-format pages; one reads it with delight at one sitting. The Hungarian capital – birthplace of football legend Ferenc Puskas and the philosopher and literary critic György Lukacs – are the ideal setting for the story, and the city is omnipresent throughout the  narrative. The plot develops at a turning point for the Eastern bloc, Europe, and the destiny of the world in 1989, shortly before the fall of the Berlin Wall. From an old aristocratic and slightly decadent Budapest, whose atmosphere the author skillfully depicts, the action is briefly transferred to neighboring Vienna as well. 

Born in 1956 in Piraeus, Kostas Kalfopoulos studied sociology, political science and history of the Middle Ages at the University of Hamburg. Since 1996, he has worked as a sports correspondent for the Neue Zurcher Zeitung, contributes to Kathimerini newspaper and is a member of the Association of Foreign Correspondents in Greece. After a series of essay volumes - Season of the Tramp, Roaming through Modernity and others, his first novel, Café Lukacs revives, according to the author's own words, "a neglected by writers and publishers in Greece literary genre - the roman noir, which, however, is slowly but surely coming back." 

In an interview for www.humantraffic.wordprss.com Kalfopoulos explains why he chose Budapest as the setting for his novel: "The reasons are many but the main one, also mentioned in the book, is the tendency to escape from the "Greek misery" with the help of literature. In addition, Budapest is suitable as a "place for escapism”; it combines splendor and decadence, Hungarians and Greeks (traders and political emigrants); it is a city of philosophy, music and football, but as all European metropolises – it has exclusive history in urbanism, with an atmosphere for those who have known the city beyond the standard tours "Vienna-Budapest-Prague." 

In his review in the literary supplement of the newspaper Ta Nea, entitled "The Beautiful Black Danube", critic Dimosthenis Kourtovik quotes the author’s list of reasons why the plot could not have been set in Athens. “I was also interested in the historical depth: socialism in transition with forms of capitalism in it, Germanophone education, the issue of the Hungarian Holocaust - completely unknown in Greece, which gained popularity after the case of the (alleged) death of Aribert Heim* in Egypt. Naturally, I could not write about this city if I had only visited it as a regular tourist.” 

The protagonist of the novel, narrating the story in the first singular, can be qualified as a literal alter-ego of the author. Journalist by profession, he arrives in Budapest in August 1989, in order to participate in a congress, after which he has several days of vacation awaiting him. From the description of his walks around the streets of Budapest, it is obvious that he knows the city on the Danube very well, as in the past he has conducted there an investigation collecting material for Greek Civil War political emigrants. 

In the old cafe in Pest, symptomatically bearing the name of the great philosopher - Café Lukacs, known to the character from his previous visit to the city, he meets an aristocratic lady of a mature age, still retaining traces of a femme fatale, who dazzles him with her strange charm, and after long hours of conversation about literature and music, he ends up at her home, where they spend an unforgettable sensual night, taken by her to the "secretive landscape” of innocence. When he leaves the next morning, he takes with him a scarf and one of her children's songs books. This will be the first and last night he sees this mysterious woman, because the next day he learns that she has died. A mysterious letter with a poem, delivered to him by hand at his hotel, and two other unexplained murders, will further tighten the knot of criminal intrigue, putting the question of who is behind these events, which remain a mystery at the end of the novel as well. 

What is the relationship between the offender and the mysterious lady? What is her relationship to the hero? He presents himself voluntarily at the police station, because he was the last one to see the victim alive; the interrogation is led by a police inspector sharing the same name as the famous Hungarian thinker - Lukacs. The information given to him about her connect her to the past – to the Nazis, European Jewry and their persecution, and the protection afforded their former tormenters – but this does not result in more clarity. Fate, past, the town and the mysterious woman weave a net that will capture even the narrator of the story. Fate as a force which cannot be escaped, the past as a historic testament, the city as vast threatening forest, the femme fatale as an excuse are some of the traps. The structural and narrative elements of the police novel, (sometimes as a hint and other times referring directly to this genre) are combined with a description of roving in the city’s labyrinth, history and feelings. 

The big advantage of Café Lukacs is its fascinating atmosphere, embracing from the very first pages every movement of the characters. With gray, sad socialist Budapest as a backdrop, Kalfopulos uses all known techniques, typical for adventure novels, in order to make us feel familiar in an unknown environment, in which the pieces of a dark and vague puzzle must be put together. The pace of the novel unfolds without digression or deliberate sensationalism, but rather with allusions to police stories, catching the reader by the throat with their nostalgia and sometimes romance. The final passage of the novel sheds light on the thought of the author and answers why things remain in the twilight even at the end of the story: "Well, life is such that in the meantime something always happens. As long as you are lucky enough to catch up with the right moment and to experience it, then you will be extremely lucky if you remember it years afterwards.” Thus, years later the case will emerge again at the forefront of his mind when everything will already be a distant memory: "Un souvenir, c 'est l' image d 'un rêve...". 

The constant recourse to intertextuality, as literary and cinematic text, builds a plot, in which raw constructive materials are the borrowings. Meeting with a passenger on the train with a bowler hat, raincoat, hands of a pianist and face of a "janitor"; in the underworld slang and in pulp language means implementation of "wet contracts” (remember the psychotic images of Victor the Cleaner, recreated by Jean Reno in Luc Besson’s Nikita (1990), and the imperturbable assassin Léon in Besson’s eponymous 1994 follow-up. The movie-buff reader will recognize a reference to Wim Wenders’ The American Friend (1977), the loose screen adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's novel Ripley’s Game and others. The hero also discovers neighboring Austria, the venue of Kalfoloupos’ previous book - The Third Man - and goes to the legendary cinema Bellaria, where films of the interwar period are screened. The author's intent suggests also time-travel, as the recent past is marked by the choice of events at the Austro-Hungarian border in August 1989, which had set in motion the collapse of the socialist bloc and the fall of the Berlin Wall. The tape goes back also to the distant guilty past in search of war criminals on the site of the martyrdom of their victims.  When events are taken from the pages of history in such way, they become associated with the life of the victim and we are on track to understand the reasons for the crime, which finally remains undisclosed.
  
Café Lukacs is a policier or a detective story, inspired and well-written, which originally combines pages from other books, historic episodes, film footage and a character whose experiences resemble liminal conditions between dreams and reality. A critical review of the novel likens its protagonist as an "extra in a film, about the plot of which he knows almost nothing." The moral dilemmas of the hero are confronted with his instinct for self-preservation. The series of crimes will reveal a painful past, with roots lying in the years of the Holocaust in Hungary. The dark "forest of the city" will first reveal the marvelous, and then the sinister dimension of the city. 

In his preface to the novel, the famous Greek writer Vassilis Vassilikos writes: "The book is read in less than an hour or as long as a flight from Athens to Thessaloniki (with the well-known delay) lasts or in the Eurostar train crossing the English Channel. But mostly, on one’s way to Budapest.” In his review in Ta Nea, mentioned in the interview with Kalfopoulos, D. Kourtovik devotes much space to "clarifying" the meaning of the the word "noir" in the sense of criminal novel. Incidentally, he writes: "According to the prevailing understanding, the term "noir" refers to police novels, in which the full uncertainty of darkness comes from everywhere, both literally – through the scenes, deployable, mainly among urban night landscape and gloomy interiors – and figuratively, by moral ambiguity penetrating the stories. Suppressive uncertainty extends to the very protagonist, who is not a typical detective, as his image alternates, or rather his roles merge: investigator and investigated, someone both innocent and guilty.” 

Even the hero himself may be seen as a victim of the old lady, seduced by her aristocratic charm. Her murder evokes Nazi phantoms, which still haunt some European cities. Hints of cinema and literature, alternating bright and dark frames, voluptuous echoes, cosmopolitan images, hidden mystery and plenty of roaming “with a cause”, memoirs, and searches and ending at dusk, Kalfopoulos’ intriguing novel is a fair example of "voluminous" not always being necessary for good quality literature. 

I take a look on the Net for some reader opinions, and once again the blogger with the pen-name Patriarch Photios surprises me with his critical acumen: "Lazy read that will appeal to those who love old French movies, in which the atmosphere of old sepia-colored photos or black-and-white footage are of greater importance rather than the actual plot of the story.” 

 

* Former Austrian doctor, known as Doctor Death, because of his "medical" experiments as an SS officer at Mauthausen concentration camp, accused of murdering and torturing inmates by methods such as direct injection of toxic substances in the heart muscle. 

Zdravka Mihaylova was awarded the prize of the Union of Greek Writers in 2005 for best translation of a Greek author of the Balkan language book Andreas Embirikos: Surrealist, Psychoanalyst and Photographer”. She has translated thirty books from Greek into Bulgarian and several from Bulgarian into Greek: prose, poetry, essays, theater plays, short stories.

 

Tags: Noir novel Greek literature
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