Hind Thoughts

By Paul Gray

THE CITY BUILDER by George Konrad Translated by Ivan Sanders Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; 184 pages; $7.95

In The Case Worker (1974), Hungarian Novelist and Sociologist George Konrad examined a day in the life of a state welfare worker in Budapest. As a catalogue of human detritus, the novel was both powerful and disturbing; in its rapid-fire vignettes and tortured ruminations, it strained toward poetry. Konrad was justifiably praised as a promising new international voice and as something even more rare--a sociologist who can write.

Konrad's second novel again deals with a civil servant, an unnamed city planner for a provincial town in an unspecified Eastern European country. However, this time the clients are not bizarre, ruined people but buildings, factories and streets. The abstraction of architecture casts a chill over the planner's meditations. When he looks at an old man, he peers beyond individual details to "make out the final chapters of Eastern European history, its way of life down to the last coffin nail, its untold mental anguish, its ill-concealed hind thoughts, the well-tended museum of its anxieties, its fits of rage over a strip of grazing land."

This habit of skipping past the physical toward the philosophical makes The City Builder an altogether less-urgent narrative than The Case Worker. The bureaucrat hero has evidently led an interesting, if calamitous life, but he strews the details so negligently through his thoughts that only the most vigilant reader can piece them together. Konrad tries to atone for such cold impersonality by giving his builder a warm, strenuously rhetorical prose style (gracefully rendered by Translator Ivan Sanders). The effect is often striking. Konrad's metaphors can go off like depth charges: "Marble-faced generals in their epaulets and decorations receive the homage of subservient anniversaries. Men reduced to street names meet on this square." Yet when he recounts his surreal dreams, the narrator sometimes seems to be giving an unconscious impression of Woody Allen: "A man with a sack stands in the doorway, and when I walk up the stairs he grabs my ankle and stuffs me into his sack. He sits on my mouth all the way home and later, sitting by his stove, eats hot noodles from my naked belly." Still, such moments are well worth enduring for the author's stern intelligence and overriding awareness of social forces. In his own eccentric way, the city planner is trying to understand the dispiriting decay of his time and his place. He wants to reconcile his early socialist ideals with the "society of centralized reallocation" that he and his fellow bureaucrats have engineered. He wonders why the exercise of power has left him feeling so weak: "A planner can neither improve things nor make them much worse." His thoughts become increasingly aphoristic: "The bureaucrat is bound to his fellow workers by incurable resentment." In the end, his rambling monologue amounts to a masterly disquisition on the vanity--and the necessity--of human wishes. Konrad's novel may not enchant, but it educates.

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