UK rights sold to Telegram Books. US & Canada available.
A linguist flying to a conference in Helsinki lands instead somewhere unrecognizable and, most vexingly, despite his superlative language skills, and all his painstaking decoding efforts, he doesn’t understand or even glean any meaning from the words being spoken to him in this unexpected destination. In the unending and oddly retro metropolis teeming with a morose and downtrodden population, there is not a single being able to communicate with Budai. As one claustrophobic day follows another, he wonders why no one has found him, whether his wife is trying to call him or has given him up for dead, how he’ll survive with the little money he has left, and how he’ll get by in this society that looks so familiar, yet is so strange. Only the beautiful elevator-operator in his hotel seems to notice him. Her name sounds like Épépé but it could just as well be Bébé, Tétété, Tété, or Tchétché. In a vision of hell unlike any previously imagined, Budai, the man of words, must learn to survive in a world where words and meaning are unconnected, and human speech is reduced to guttural sounds that seem to be in a constant state of evolution.
This is a suspenseful and haunting Hungarian classic from the Cold War period, that was first published in France in 1996. In 1999,
Éditions Denoël reissued the work, and this latest edition appears in time for the reissue of another novel of Karinthy’s, L’Âge d’or, with a preface by Emmanuel Carrère.