Far from Nothing.

Matt Hartman is a freelance editor and cataloguer, running Hartman Cataloguing, Editing and Indexing Services.

The plot of Romanian-born Böszörményi’s first novel involves Rudolf, successful car salesman by day, student of philosophy by night. Rudolf is a devotee of several things, one of them being his lover, Wanda, a fellow student. He is also a follower of René Déscartes and the theory of dualism, which holds that the relationship between mind and matter is essentially non-physical. “Can the mind concentrate on two things at the same time?” Rudolf asks himself. “Can one deny one’s existence while working and interacting with other people?”

Criticizing any creative work in translation is difficult. This is true with Böszörményi’s book: how much of the novel’s archaic and stylized speech is the fault of the author and how much of the translator? Böszörményi’s decision to let Rudolf tell much of his story in the first person only heightens the problems. “I often fall into wondering what it was about Wanda that immediately attracted me to her with such extraordinary force,” he says for no particular reason. “Her smile? The secret that glistened in her smile? The secret that lured me inside itself like a Homeric epic? Am I a captive? The captive of a feminine smile? Wanda’s enigmatic smile?” This internal monologue, like so many others in the book, comes from nothing and goes nowhere. The Cartesian conundrums, the sexual trysts, the personal relationships—they are too often left dangling. At a certain point the reader doesn’t really care.