Gyula Krúdy's Life Is a Dream

How would you spend the last night of your life before facing an unbeatable opponent in a duel? Satisfying an inexplicable craving for pork rind or securing dapper headgear in which to face your foe?

Titusz Finedwell, one protagonist in Gyula Krúdy's Life Is a Dream, opts for the latter. The hapless hack's scribblings have landed him in hot water with a gentlemen's club called The Casino, and as a result he must face the Colonel, a crack shot, in a duel the following afternoon. "We all have to die some day," a cloakroom attendant tells Titusz, to which the latter retorts, "But not in a crummy hat like this!" Welcome to 1920s Budapest and the topsy-turvy world of Gyula Krúdy.

While Hemingway, Stein and Fitzgerald were honing their craft in Paris, the coffeehouses of the Hungarian capital played host to their own struggling literati. Krúdy became legendary in the city's cafés for the excesses of his Bohemian existence. His nocturnal misadventures provided much of the inspiration for his prose, including Life Is a Dream, a collection of short stories the author self-published in 1931 that has been recently translated into English by John Bakti.

Life Is a Dream introduces a lively cast of characters and their antics to Anglophone readers; alongside Finedwell and the Colonel, we meet aspiring poetesses, amorous hog-dealers, temperance league reformers, elderly panders, harassed waiters and crazed lovers, all brought vividly to life by Krúdy's engaging prose.

Men get so drunk they hang themselves by accident or tumble into open graves, where they lie comatose until morning. A wife sends her recently deceased husband straight back to his mistress - but not before snatching his fur hat and jacket. Lovers quarrel over salad dressing and accuse each other of being anarchists for refusing to eat pheasant. Black comedy and farce abound in these tales, but there's more to Life Is a Dream than mordant one-liners.

Rather than twists and turns of plot, it is Krúdy's ability to nail the precise detail that makes these stories enjoyable. The opening portrait of Aranka in "The Landlady," for example, highlights the ease with which she is able to skillfully size up customers: "As she approached forty, she had gotten into the habit of scrutinizing a man the way she would a goose or a rooster, just short of actually hoisting him up to estimate his weight."

The comic descriptions of the improbably named Nyergesujfalusi's hypersensitive nose in "The Apostle of the Heavenly Saints" are delightfully inventive. The holy man's nose is likened to "a foppish bridegroom facing a variety of joyous tasks in the offing, setting out with high hopes, attracted by pleasurable scents," "a corncob stuck by children into the face of a snowman," as well as "a rotund blood sausage simmering in its rich broth."

These references to food are more than mere narrative color. They point to the collection's central preoccupation: eating. Most of the stories unfold in taverns or hostelries, but whatever the setting, the characters are constantly chomping through victuals of one sort or another. For Proust, it was the act of tasting a Madeleine that stimulated creative reverie. It seems that unctuous stews or pickled herring had the same effect for Krúdy.

Dining out in the Budapest of the Habsburg era was not for the faint-hearted. It is little wonder so many of Krúdy's characters are dyspeptic, given that their diet consisted of such culinary delights as sour lungs, oily cabbage and pigs' knuckles. Indeed, it is one such character's relationship with food that defines him as much as his job as editor of the Budapest Sunday News, which he valiantly struggles to get to the newsstands on time.

"The story of his chronic stomach ailment was the story of his life. Yet all his livelong days he was obliged to bolt down the braised portolt gravies, soupy goulashes and watery broths bathing in the slabs of boiled beef served up by tavern kitchens everywhere."

This melancholic hypochondriac who shoots himself after a hard day's brunching could almost have wandered off the set of a Woody Allen film.

Despite his evident talent and prolific output, Krúdy struggled to live by his pen and died in obscurity. Life Is a Dream proffers no single kernel of truth for the reader to digest, but, as a man who was no doubt forced to skip more than one meal in his time, Krúdy has at least one important message, or what he called "one bit of true wisdom":

"Lunch is the most important thing in a man's life."

Lisette Allen can be reached at
features@praguepost.com