The Last Window-Giraffe - Hardcover

Péter Zilahy

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1843312840 ISBN 13: 9781843312840

Verlag: Anthem Press - IPSUK, 2008

Inhaltsangabe

The Last Window-Giraffe’ is a playful and personal journey through the political unrest of the seventies and eighties. It was inspired by a Hungarian children’s dictionary, entitled ‘Window-Giraffe’, which explained the whole world in simple terms; a world where everything was in order and all problems were easily solved. Popular across Europe for the best part of a decade, ‘The Last Window-Giraffe’ is a politically infused rendition of the original: quirky, astute and powerful. Péter Zilahy draws on his travels around the soft dictatorships of Eastern Europe, offering his acerbic observations on the often bizarre spectacle. In one instance he describes the carnival-like protests against the Milosevic regime in Belgrade simply and humorously. This reflects, like the format of the book, the manner in which the regime treat their people like children. [NP] Filled with his own striking photographs, Zilahy gives fascinating insight into a whole other universe behind the Iron Curtain. ‘The Last Window-Giraffe’ is one of the most unusual, beguiling books you will ever read.

For more information please see the book website:www.lastwindowgiraffe.anthempressblog.com

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Péter Zilahy was born in 1970 in Budapest, Hungary. He is a writer and performer with diverse interests. His books have been translated into 18 languages. In 2001 he was a lecturer at New York University. His dictionary-novel ‘The Last Window-Giraffe’ won the Book of the Year Prize in Ukraine in 2003.

Lawrence Norfolk is the author of three novels, including ‘In the Shape of a Boar’.

Tim Wilkinson worked as an academic editor in Hungary in the 1970s. Alongside a number of translations of historical works, he has translated three novels by Imre Kertész.

Von der hinteren Coverseite

Péter Zilahy is just the vagabond polymath the New Europe needs. Don't wait. Climb aboard the rollercoaster today. Read The Last Window–Giraffe as an elaborate, erudite, gut-wrenching belly-laugh at everything that went wrong and all the people who failed to fix it.' Lawrence Norfolk, author of ‘In the Shape of a Boar’  ‘Wonderful!' Victor Pelevin, author of ‘Babylon’ ‘Not only a great piece of literature but a visual feast as well.' Julian Evans, BBC  'In these bittersweet pages you will find the fall of the regimes, and the last twenty years of Eastern Europe.' Enrico Remmert, Rolling Stone Magazine 'Péter Zilahy, wanderer, adventurer, initiator of a great many performances and provocations, much resembles Jean-Arthur Rimbaud during the Commune of Paris.' Yuri Andrukhovych, author of ‘Twelve Rings’ and ‘The Secret’ This book is about the madness of everyday life under a dictatorship. It shifts in theme and time, testing the borderlines of prose and poetry, fiction and non-fiction, history and autobiography – all in the unassuming guise of a child’s ABC. Filled with his own striking photographs, Péter Zilahy gives fascinating insight into whole other universe behind the Iron Curtain. The Last Window–Giraffe is one of the most unusual, beguiling books you will ever read.

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The Last Window-Giraffe

By Zilahy, Peter

Anthem Press

Copyright © 2008 Zilahy, Peter
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9781843312840
Péter Zilahy - The Last Window–Giraffe (excerpts) The Window–Giraffe was a picture book from which we learned to read when we didn’t know how. I already knew how by then, but I had to learn it anyway, because what else was school for. The Window–Giraffe made the world intelligible to us in alphabetical order. Everything had its rhyme and reason, symbolic or mundane. Thus, we could learn from it that the sun rises in the east, that our hearts are on the left, that the Great October Revolution took place in November, and that light floods in through a window – even when it is closed. The Window–Giraffe was full of seven-headed dragons, fairies, devils and princes, but it told us that these things do not exist. I remember four kinds of dragons that do not exist, and also three princes. The Window–Giraffe taught us to read between the lines. It was taken as much for granted as the teddy-bear on the children’s bedtime TV programme. It didn’t occur to anyone to question it. The window–giraffe was a window–giraffe. The Window–Giraffe is my childhood, the changing room, the PE class, the continual growing taller, the age before a better age, goulash communism, my homework, my innocence, my generation. The Window–Giraffe is a book one of whose characters was myself. It was only on being asked twenty years later that I realized the words of its title stood for the Hungarian alpha and omega. Yes, the ablak – window – is the beginning, the opening through which the light comes, whereas zsiráf – giraffe – is a bounded infinite – surrealism, flaming giraffes, we’ll never die! A dictionary which contains what’s been left out. There’s a window–giraffe in Paris as well – I saw it on a postcard. It’s called the Eye-fell Tower. It was sent by Sophie Brünner, who had defected to France with her parents and was now studying from a French reading primer. The Eye-fell Tower has a long neck, four legs, and an awful lot of windows: window and giraffe in one, even its name sounds good too, spur and promise in one, surpassing the I’m-just-a-tot-I’ll-grow-up-one-day attitude of the nursery, a sudden leap, holding out the hope of a definitive break from the worm’s eye view, which the express elevator down the middle reduces to a matter of technology. Sophie looked a bit like a giraffe herself, except she didn’t have a window or an express lift down her middle. The express lift was in my throat when she tiptoed over to my desk on her matchstick legs and let me smell her fragrant eraser. That night I was in syllabifying ecstasies, with letters zooming into view like cat’s eyes on a dark road. The next day, she defected. Our class teacher told us that her family had gone away unexpectedly. She might well have said ‘was cut down in its prime’, the way Party leaders go. The fragrant eraser left an indelible mark on my heart. Only later did we discover they hadn’t gone off on a holiday at all, when as a proxy for herself she sent the Eye-fell Tower, which was just like a window–giraffe, except at least it made some sense to anyone who could read between the lines. I was a virgin, but that didn’t bother me. I didn’t have a clue. The world was black-and-white, you could see it on TV. I can still see, as if before my eyes, the extra time played by Argentina and Holland in the ’78 World Cup, the Baader-Meinhof and Salyut-Apollo link-up, the death of the King (I didn’t know who Elvis was, but Dad was choked), the ash cloud over Mount St. Helens, ‘Bertie’ Farkas the first Hungarian in space, and the Rubik Cube World Championship in Budapest. Sports were exciting in black-and white. In a boxing match you had to tell the boxers apart by counting the stripes on their socks. I even remember how many stripes my first date had. I’m not sure about the colour of the eyes, even now I see her in black-and-white. After the first kiss my parents bought a colour TV, and it turned out that the Dutch are orange, whereas the Italians are blue, and there are even red devils. Only the Germans remained black-and-white, as if they were being punished. Their country was split in two as well. I almost felt sorry for them. My first childhood memory is of crawling on all fours during the rest period at nursery school. The curtains are drawn, and there’s a moon shining on the white blankets. It can’t be the Moon itself, of course; we were never there at night. Anyway, I’m crawling on all fours under the beds, afraid that if the others wake up, then I shall wake up as well. I am alone, a near-fictitious child, balancing on the creaking parquet floor, breadcrumbs drilling into my kneecaps. I’m small and nobody notices me. I’m worming my way along the enormous room as if I had been doing it for hours. I’m dodging hands and feet that are dangling out from under the white sheets. Dead tired little angels. Formations of fleecy clouds float past, podgy fingers, dimples, curly locks. Uh-oh! Somebody’s coming the other way under the bed. Our heads bump, but because of the sheet I don’t see the face. She’s panting on my neck, hot breath. The nursery assistants are coming in their white overalls, white socks and white slippers. We crouch under the bed, her little hand grasping my little hand. Her palm is sweaty. The historic building on top of Eagle Hill where I went to school had been a convent before it was upgraded into an institution of learning. When German troops occupied Hungary, in March 1944, they set up their HQ in the main hall. This is where Budapest’s military commander was detained. The hall later served as our gym, and we ran round and round in circles between its historic walls, a domestic history in a tucked handstand. The Magyars entered Hungary along the highway of nations, said our walrus-moustached PE instructor, which sounded good. I could just imagine them trying to hitch a lift on the steppes, holding up a marrowbone with ‘Hungary’ scratched on it in runic script, but nobody could read it. Leapfrog over the box and a cartwheel on landing. According to sir, a huge expanse of wasteland stretches from the Pacific to the Great Hungarian Plain, roughly from the Amur to the Danube, with the Magyars at one end and the Gulag at the other, so we’d better behave. He dished out two-handed slaps so we would not lose our balance – his idea of the golden mean. I would rather have climbed a pole or done two circuits. No more helping hands, he said, and bore down on me with all the gravitas he could muster. He just wanted to mould me into an upright Hungarian. Something didn’t add up, because although our language was supposed to be our greatest remaining treasure, they were trying to get me to hold my tongue. Domestic history merged into anatomy, patriotism into grammar, solidarity into moulding. To cut a long story short, the Magyars came to Hungary a thousand years ago, and they’ve kept on coming ever since. No-one knows where from or where to, and anyone who says differently is wrong, or not Magyar, or not honest. The Magyars are shrouded in mystery, or lost. The Magyars do not stand out: they look just like anybody else and assimilate with ease wherever they may be, except in Hungary, where they are divided by a common tongue. The Magyar has a little bit of the Serbo-Croat...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Anthem Press - IPSUK
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2008
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1843312840
• ISBN 13: 9781843312840
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 130
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: GPSR Kontakt; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Deutschland