Örkény István: The Flower Show and the Toth Family

Description

In the ’60s and ’70s, Örkény’s vein of black comedy earned him the epithet “master of the grotesque” for the popular dramatizations of these and other novels. The Flower Show (1977) is Örkény’s last novel and his most widely translated work of fiction.With consummate irony, the author exploits our universal unease in the face of death, the desire to “star” taken to its ultimate absurdity by playing the lead in one’s own demise, and the voyeurism of the modern media. In The Toth Family (1967) a mad armymajor on leave terrorizes a village fireman and his family, forcing them to cut and fold endless quantities of cardboard packing boxes every night until dawn. Originally written as a film script, the novel’s scenes flicker past in lunatic array as Örkénysatirizes Hungary of the early ’40s and the acquiescence of a quasi-feudal, nationalistic, caste-ridden society to the authoritarian state of Nazi Germany. The impression is as if the Marx Brothers had been born out of Dr. Strangelove.