The Swimmer

Product Description

Hngary, 1956. Without a word, Katalin leaves her family and sets out for the West. Her husband, Kalman, abandons the family farm and begins a long journey through Hungary with their two young children, Kata and Isti. His only purpose is to keep moving. Staying with distant relatives in unfamiliar cities and villages for varying lengths of time, he shuns anything resembling a home or a steady life, sinking into depression that drives the children to create their own imaginary universe: Kata invents relationships with the people they meet during their long journey while Isti converses with the natural world around him. It is only in rare moments, on riverbanks and lakeshores where Kata and Isti swim with their father, that they experience moments of calm and wonder if they will ever see their mother again.

Review

"THE SWIMMER's greatest strength is in imagining what happens to those left in the wake of a mother's desertion."

"[An] outstanding debut novel...[it] introduces a potentially great voice in world literature"

"[A] spare, resonant debut"

"Bank's interest in how the imagination can fill absence and longing with portents is grounded in exceptional powers of description"

About the Author

Zsuzsa BÁnk is the recipient of numerous prizes and fellowships and has already achieved great success in Europe with this, her first novel. She lives in Frankfurt.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Toward the end of summer Manci said I had to go to school. When my father didn't make a move, Manci announced that she herself would register me. Then Father took our clothes out of the closet, and I folded them without saying a word, while Manci kept trying to persuade him to stay. We carried our suitcases along the gallery, past the many windows, down the stairs, and past the metal mailboxes, exactly the same way we had come. Erzsi followed us-Manci had knocked on her window-and pressed a little foil-wrapped packet of bitter chocolate into Isti's hands.

Now we found out where Father had spent his Budapest nights: at his friend Éva's house. Éva drove us in her car, heading east. As she never tired of explaining to Manci and Erzsi, she was driving into her future. She had a fiancé. His name was Karcsi, and the wedding was only a few weeks off. Pointing at the car, Manci whispered to Erzsi that he certainly must be a good catch.

Éva put her hands on the steering wheel. Her fingernail polish was pink. Isti and I sat in the backseat. We had never been in a car before, or even known anybody who had one. Éva started the engine and Isti unwrapped Erzsi's chocolate. "Just don't smear it on the seats," Éva warned. My father lit another cigarette, rolled down the window and let his arm hang out. Erzsi grabbed it with both hands and said, "Take care of the children." Manci started to cry, and when the car began to move, we waved to her through the rear window as she got smaller and smaller, until she finally vanished.

Father never took us back to Pest. Not to see Manci, or Erzsi, or anyone else. But wherever we happened to be, Isti and I would go to the station to look through the timetables for trains that went there. We walked, we went by bicycle when we could get one, or we let strangers take us on their motorcycles. I had shown Isti what the word Budapest looked like. For a long time, it was the only word he could read. Very few trains went to Budapest. When we found one that did, we memorized the departure time and kept repeating it to each other. Isti didn't forget a single one. Even after we had left a place long before, he remembered the schedule for the trains to Budapest. We turned it into a game. Isti would challenge me: "Ask me one." I'd name a town, and he'd tell me the times. Departure and arrival.

We really didn't know what 7:15 or 17:53 meant. For us, the times listed were nothing but numbers, numbers next to each other. Like the price of a pound of potatoes