In his rollicking novel The Last Window-Giraffe, the Hungarian author Peter Zilahy has revisited one of the prouder recent chapters in the history of the Balkans: the three-month anti-Milosevic protests which shook Belgrade in the winter of 1996-7. Blending history and reportage, linguistics and politics, family memoir and Balkan myth, Zilahy delivers a generational confession which suggest the fragmented destiny of a post-Soviet Europe.
The novel follows Peter, a Hungarian man in his twenties, as he hops the Balkan Express from Budapest to Belgrade and joins the tide of Serbian protesters who are attempting to topple Europe’s last dictator. He hears their speeches, sings their songs, drinks their slivovic, has brushes with their women and taunts the ferocious-looking police lines in a quest to find his own revolution – the one he missed in 1956. Coming of age in an “era that had treated us like children and held us back from growing up suddenly collapsed and vanished into thin air”, the narrator reflects both the bitterness and the innocence of a generation that was first absorbed and then displaced by the Soviet experience.
The novel takes its title – and its quirky format, arranged in sections from A to Z with photographs and drawings – from the Soviet-era dictionary from which all Hungarian schoolchildren learned to read and write (ablak is window, zsiraf is giraffe). Zilahy’s restless, at times euphoric, prose, which jumps constantly, even jarringly, from scene to scene, at times risks losing less patient readers on his anecdotal detours through the Balkan past and present.
From meditations on the poetry of the war criminal Radovan Karadzic and the youthful ambitions of Marshal Tito, to Gavrilo Princip’s carefully planned assassination of the Austrian Archduke Ferdinand and the death of a mythical Hungarian soldier named Dugovics, who in the fifteenth century wrestled a Turk off a castle wall, Zilahy weaves through the wreckage of pre- and post-Yugoslav history, dismantling it piece by piece, always returning to the central narrative of the Belgrade protests.
Zilahy’s jokes take the form of political one-liners – “Belgraders count riot cops instead of sheep to get off to sleep”; “If the US is a human melting pot, then Eastern Europe is a scrap yard” – as he takes us through the narrator’s childhood, beginning with his birth: “The doctors decided my due date was November 7th, the anniversary of the Great October Revolution. My mother declared that she was going to hold out for one more day even if it killed her”. The book’s rambling passages on freedom and sex are also politically aligned (“My bumpy road to sexual maturity was paved with the deaths of Communist dictators”).It is said that you must avoid excessive use of online levitra canada these pills. So while it is important to watch for signs of stress that can have a negative impact on their masculinity and virility. wholesale viagra from canada click to read more is the perfect medicine for you. The tablet should ideally be cipla viagra generic taken approximately half an hour before having sex. Impotence problems are not choosing the age, race, social status or purchase cheap viagra balance in the department of physical, mental and spiritual satisfaction.
The Last Window-Giraffe, which has been translated into eighteen languages since it appeared in Hungary in 1998, won the 2003 Book of the Year prize in Ukraine, where it was hailed as a handbook for the Orange Revolution. Zilahy is aware of the theatrical element of demonstrations, describing torsos of men and women pressed together, legs dancing to stay warm in the sub-zero cold, arms hurling snowballs and cabbage and rotten eggs as the stand-off with police continues. “The set keeps changing, the props get broken or are replaced” , he writes; “everybody is actor and audience (in) a never-ending dress rehearsal of a work-in-progress, a revolution which never reaches its dramatic climax”.
In the end – nearly four years and one devastating war in Kosovo later – Belgrade managed to dethrone its dictator and set itself on a democratic course. Today, that course is in jeopardy again, in part because of deep-seated reactionary forces which date back to the Soviet years; forces Zilahy grapples with in his descriptions of the Serbian pro-government protesters who “fell for the idea of Yugoslavian brotherhood, believed Tito would last for ever, and now believe Milosevic is a saviour . . . who bought a line, took the hook, guzzled and lapped it up, swallowed it whole, gulped it down and still refuse to believe that they’ve been had, that they’re cannon fodder, spooks from a crypt, suckers . . . Yugoslavs.”
Zilahy’s story – his generation’s story, Belgrade’s story and the story of Soviet- trampled Eastern Europe – comes down to choices. “You have to make choices”, the narrator declares in the closing pages, “even when there is nothing to choose from.”