Zsolt Koppány Nagy is a prose writer, literary translator, and editor born in Târgu Mureș (Marosvásárhely); he is also the holder of several prestigious literary awards. Since the early 2000s, for almost a quarter of a century now, he has been building his prose writing career, dominated primarily by novels and short story collections. His satirical nature, sarcasm, irony, and penchant for parody represent a unique splash of colour in Hungarian literature, which is fundamentally less receptive to humour. His books are characterised by thematic and stylistic diversity; he is a perpetual experimenter, an author always ready for linguistic and literary games. With unfailing creativity and a solid linguistic base, as a connoisseur of literary tradition, he builds his works, all of which contain a powerful reflection on writing and the genesis of the text. His works have been translated into English, German, Portuguese, Romanian, Czech, and Bulgarian.
Starting a Career – Arról, hogy milyen nehéz (About How Hard It Is)
Even the cover of the author's debut volume, published in 2000, is provocative; the same applies to the texts within this merely 128 pages long book. Part of the impudence is directed at the supposed critic, the analyst of the text: “Attention! This text is not made for the Reader, but directly for the interpreting philologist!”, reads the perplexing aside, one of many in the volume. As will be observable in later works, not only the story read in the texts but also the creation of the story, and even its reception, are thematised here, while the tone is typically mocking-ironic, inclining towards the sarcastic. But alongside the defining ironic tone, there are also elevated, vulgar, and playful utterances; furthermore, the volume is highly varied, not only in terms of modes of speech, but also in terms of themes. Arról, hogy milyen nehéz (On How Difficult It Is) is the realisation of typical career-starting brainstorming and bold experimentation, with the asymmetries considered inevitable at such points, and the unevenness still occasionally characteristic of novice writers. The volume, by an author merely twenty-two-year-old, is a search for a voice; it is not yet clear what must be left behind and what must be carried forward. This is why László Márton, in his critique published in the 2002/4 issue of Látó, speaks of an immature author, whilst appreciating that the volume has numerous excellent concepts. “Koppány Nagy is occupied by signs, traces, their expressibility in words, the connection of expressibility with bodily signs and – seemingly independent – external events. He is interested in responsibility and vulnerability. He is interested in the origin of good and evil. He is interested in the fundamental questions of writing” he summarises in his piece.
The First (Meta)novel – Jozefát úr, avagy a regénykedés (Mr Jozefát, or Novelizing)
Zsolt Koppány Nagy's debut novel, published in 2006, received outstanding critical attention and, after the aforementioned path-finding, may represent a kind of arrival; it was the runner-up in a joint competition by Alexandra Kiadó (Alexandra Publishing) and Irodalmi Jelen (Literary Present). The title of the volume itself indicates that the reader will be dealing not only with a novel, but also with the story of writing a novel; thus, the text will certainly have meta-level reflections on questions of the genre and writing in general. There are many references in the text pointing to the reader, the mode and difficulties of reception, and the narrator – just as in the first volume – constantly speaks out to his reader: “What a tricky name this Jozefát is, thinks the dear reader, and perhaps immediately searches their memory for reading experiences. Do not do so, we ask, together with Mr. Jozefát.”
The first piece of the twin novel (Jozefát úr téblábolásai (Mr. Jozefát’s Wandering))) is a relatively easy-to-understand and -follow text. Its hero is the lanky English teacher, Mr. Jozefát, who is hopelessly in love with Léna. She comes from the same village as him, but does not pay much attention to the clumsy hero. In the first two hundred pages, the narrative guides the reader through the habits and life of this strange bachelor, and his attempts at conquest, which usually end in failure and humiliation. In a manner reminiscent of the structural procedures of picaresque novels, we can track Jozefát's wanderings; the focus is on him throughout, the events run on a single thread moving few characters, not putting significant burden on the reader. The second part (Jozefát úr, avagy a regénykedés – Mr. Jozefát, or Novelizing) is somewhat more complex, as foreshadowed by the dedication and the motto. The paratext of the dedication is addressed to “patient readers determined for anything”, and the motto quoted from Cioran reads: “Poetry that has no other subject but itself quickly becomes exhausted and bores the reader.” Here too, comments addressed to the readers appear and indeed multiply; the text is crammed full of writers' names, quotations, inserts, literary-theoretical and philosophical reasoning, and allusions. Moreover, these are written over one another in such a way that the different layers constantly slide together; it is no longer truly decidable which text passages are about the difficulties of novel-writing and which are parts of the developing novel.
During our “wandering” through the sometimes chaotic-seeming space of the novel, our only sure and static support is a perspective of irony, which fundamentally dictates the novel's mode of speech and, stemming from the nature of irony, even its structure to a degree. The essence of irony is precisely the continuous undecidability, the state of oscillating back and forth. It is a quality that can only be interpreted by taking the context into account, yet it is capable of constantly modifying and overwriting its relationship to this medium. And Jozefát works exactly like this. It relates to writing and reception similarly, sometimes reciting theories related to them (about fusing horizons, the death of the author, intertextuality, etc.) with feigned seriousness, thereby mocking them, whilst at the same time, it is palpable that it relies on these principles and ideas in the construction of the text.
Zsolt Koppány Nagy mocks novels born based on literary-theoretical considerations, but in such a way that he himself builds from them: whilst caricaturing textual literature, he himself creates textual literature. Naturally, he does all this with the transposition and reflexivity of irony, so no one can claim he falls into the error of those he wishes to “criticise”. The text, which turns the postmodern tradition on its head and subverts it, visibly deals a lot with the problem of the recipient and reception (the dear reader and the less dear critic), and naturally with the other side: the questions of creation and the production of the text. The main question of both novel parts is: how can one write a novel, how can a possible world be created? Is the writer the absolute master of his text, or does it sometimes grow over his head and begin to “write itself”? These questions return repeatedly in this meta-novel, which seeks answers to the most fundamental problems of writing.
But reading the novel, one cannot forget the humour so characteristic of the author, about which József J. Fekete, one of the excellent interpreters of the volume, writes the following in the 2008/8 issue of Székelyföld (Szeklerland): “Within novels with themes on the boundaries of novel-writing possibilities, alongside the narrative talent coming to independent life, and the captivating, non-ostentatious erudition background emphasising its importance, the author treats humour as an essential literary category. It feels as if the reader can enjoy a splendid bus ride with this book in their lap, shocking their fellow travellers with restrained sniggers or outbursts of laughter, but this humour, like the two novels as a whole, operates on multiple levels.”
Another Collection of Short Stories – Nagyapám tudott repülni (My Grandfather Could Fly)
After the great reviews of the first novel, Zsolt Koppány Nagy turned back to short prose; his volume Nagyapám tudott repülni (My Grandfather Could Fly) was published in 2007 by Magvető Kiadó (Magvető Publishing) in the Novellárium series. Just as in the first volume, here too he plays with styles and tones, changing them frequently, which is why the textual world of the volume is extraordinarily heterogeneous. The twenty-two tightly edited short stories are arranged into two cycles; in the first, a textual world treating historical traditions freely is revealed, blending real and mythical events. A good example of elevating the everyday to the mythical, of mixing the realistic and the unrealistic, is the title story of the volume, in which the narrator presents the incredible story of his grandfather to the reader as if it was perfectly ordinary; however, by the end of the work, the figure of the grandfather – who drinks often and enthusiastically – has grown to mythic proportions, and the conclusion of the short story elevates the elderly man to the realm of timeless, miraculous things: “The next day, the village was flooded with water, and not a single living creature remained in the vicinity. Those who ventured there later say that a man flew over the waters, and stopped in places; he hovered.” The writings of the second cycle are stylistic parodies, texts somewhat more experimental than the first, which, according to the authorial intention, are at least “extremely enjoyable even for readers less versed in literary texts”. This latter statement might be misleading in that literary proficiency and knowledge of cultural traditions can bring one closer to the volume, as we stumble upon references at every step that enter into a dialogue with the style and writings of great literary predecessors. It is a heterogeneous volume, playful and experimental in mood; its themes are manifold, but it also shows great variety in terms of genres (fairy tale parody, one-minute story, diary excerpt, etc.) and styles, and the narrative techniques also change and renew from piece to piece. “But while the creator chooses freely from literary tools, from the mode of their usage we can conclude that he learned prose poetics from a few easily identifiable, canonical authors of world literature who created unique text types and textual worlds: the short stories of Zsolt Koppány Nagy pay homage to and feed upon the oeuvres of J. L. Borges, G. G. Márquez, J. Cortázar, Kafka, Hrabal, and, in Hungarian terms, István Örkény or Ádám Bodor," writes Szabolcs László about the volume in the 2009/12 issue of Korunk (Our Times).
The fundamental procedure of the book is experimentation, unconstrained writing, and parody; together with the multitude of literary allusions, which make the short story collection a truly postmodern volume. There are, of course, elements that connect the texts which are quite divergent in theme and voice; one of the most important of these is the confident play with language. Another common point in the writings is self-reflection, the prose bending back onto itself, interpreting its own formation. Zsolt Koppány Nagy's texts do not merely tell stories but also repeatedly touch upon the circumstances of storytelling. Besides telling exciting stories, these writings are also about the act of storytelling itself, making the reader aware throughout of the duality of the tale and the telling. Behind the diversity appears a protean prose writer who can easily switch style, theme, and narrative role at any time, thereby not only creating a varied textual world but also convincingly testifying to his proficiency in literature. “Tragic and ironic, fairy-tale-like and grotesque, elevated and colloquial, mythical and parodistic – the »reconciliation« and forging into an organic unity of these divergent qualities is one of the trademarks of Koppány Nagy's prose,” summarises Attila Zsolt Papp in the columns of the 2008/8 issue of Székelyföld (Szeklerland) regarding the volume.
The second novel - Amelyben Ekler Ágostra emlékezünk (In Which We Remember Ágost Ekler)
A decade after his debut, in 2010, Zsolt Koppány Nagy's second novel was published, released as the previous short story collection by Magvető Kiadó (Magvető Publishing); the blurb promised the “most sophisticated book of his career so far”. The novel starts with a death: the titular character, kitsch painter Ágost Ekler, is run over by a van, and this manner of death itself shows the writer's attraction to the absurd and the grotesque, while the deceased person's profession adds a little irony to the text. In the polyphonically structured novel, dozens of narrators are given a voice; they remember the deceased, showing their own viewpoint and individual voice in various parts. Moreover, the individual characters share not only their mode of speech and perspective, but also their own story under the pretext of remembrance. In the volume built on storytelling and the anecdotal narrative tradition, under the pretext of remembering Ágost Ekler, almost everyone tells stories about themselves at length and with relish.
Among others, the driver who caused the accident, the guardian angel, the lawyer entrusted with settling the estate, the surgeon uncle, the kitsch painter colleague, the widow, and the prostitute all get a word in and tell the story of the deceased painter; but besides the people, even the objects he used are given a voice, such as the Kotnyél, which according to the work, is a roughly 8-centimetre long, grey, plastic, flat, round-topped, open-bottomed, nervous kitchen tool.
This ironic polyphony is also a kind of verification of one of the basic theses of postmodernism, as Péter István Szakács, one of the volume's reviewers, interprets the narrative technique and structure in the 2011/6 issue of Bárka: “From all this, the postmodern worldview outlines itself that instead of a single, all-explaining Grand Narrative, there exists only a series of small stories, the truth value of which is unsettlingly relative.” Besides the narrators sharing memories of Ágost Ekler, the deceased painter's literary experiments are also included in the novel as sort of guest texts; thus the novel, like the earlier writings, is a “playground” built from fragments, polyphonic, multi-genre, using and mixing various modes of speech, where the writer's imagination, zest for experimentation, and unbridled humour are unleashed once again.
A Three-part Novel, a Darker View of the World - Nem kell vala megvénülnöd 2.0 (Thou Shouldst Not Have Been Old 2.0)
Regarding the previous volume, Zsolt Koppány Nagy stated in an interview with the journal Helikon (issue 2010/10) that he intended that novel to be the end of an era; with that volume, “the era of cheerful books demanding wit, a sense of humour, and active participation from the reader is over”. Nem kell vala megvénülnöd 2.0 (Thou Shouldst Not Have Been Old 2.0), published again by Magvető Kiadó in 2014, is a curious text, even with regard to its title, which is based on a sentence taken from the Hungarian translation of King Lear (“Thou shouldst not have been old till thou hadst been wise”, said the Fool to Lear, with the title using Vörösmarty's translation) and an IT-related denomination; this, in some way, raises the problem of the duality of tradition and innovation. The volume, defined as a novel, consists of three parts (Feljegyzések a hivatalból (Notes from the Office); Az angoltanár evangéliuma (The Gospel of the English Teacher); Nem kell vala megvénülnöd 2.0 (Thou Shouldst Not Have Been Old 2.0)), all held together by the character of the protagonist, the 72-year-old János Fényező Nagyjuhász. In the first part, his years of youth, spent in the Office of Salt and Other Scattering Materials, appear rather satirically, followed by a period as an English teacher, and finally, the years of old age laid bare before the reader. The latter is no longer merely a satirical and mocking social critique like the first two, but a negative utopia discussing the persecution and extermination of the elderly: “The soldiers are here, it rumbles in me, they are stalking me now, they must have discovered the hiding place, but what are you afraid of, I think, why do young men with guns have to hunt an old man as if he were some brave lion, only a cowardly little bunny is crouching here, he'll stick his whiskers out soon, and then you can shoot him nicely, in a civilised manner, and most importantly quickly. What a gentlemanly death it will be, I think, almost relieved, still better than being beaten to death with a club.”
The theme does indeed become gloomy compared to earlier volumes, as the volume's social critique is extremely strong, but the foundations of Zsolt Koppány Nagy's writerly universe remain unchanged: satire, the grotesque, (self-)irony, linguistic games, the incorporation of guest texts proving the writer's erudition, and the mixing of styles continue to create an unmistakable textual ensemble. However, it seems to point out more powerfully and resolutely than before not only the absurdities of society's functioning, but also the dark side of human nature.
One Year, Three Volumes – Lórúgás gyomorszájra, Apufoci, A vendégmunkás (és a) dalai (Kick to the guts, Football with Dad, The Migrant Worker and (His) Songs)
After a relatively longer hiatus of 7 years, three volumes by Zsolt Koppány Nagy appeared almost simultaneously (in 2021), published by the Előretolt Helyőrség Íróakadémia (Előretolt Helyőrség Writers’ Academy). The blurb for the short story collection Lórúgás gyomorszájra (Kick to the Guts) was written by János Dénes Orbán, who explains the chosen title as follows: “We giggle, we laugh, then suddenly we are kicked in the gut by unexpected twists and punchlines.” The humorous undertone of the writer's world, previously outlined in detail, and his play with the grotesque and ironic, are present here too, but reality – and its gloomiest, most tragic side – enters more frequently among the stories of the volume, which is divided into three parts and contains short stories. Domestic violence, suicide, spousal infidelity – these are not exactly light topics, and the heroes of the short stories are also people balancing on the periphery of society, losers to whom the machine did not deal an easy hand. The fundamental modality of the volume is humour, and the author himself calls the texts “games” and “comedies”, but the humour here is rather sarcastic and ironic; it does not make the chosen themes light.
Behind the heavy themes stand plastically and nuancedly depicted characters; Tibor Baráth, in his critique (Bárka (Ark), 2022/2), considers precisely this character building to be one of the volume's strengths: “Zsolt Koppány Nagy's authentic, plastic character portrayal is the volume's main strength; what makes the narratives relatable is that the persons almost take on a life outside the pages. The author paints a psychologically accurate picture of the characters' motivations, their innermost promptings, the driving forces of their decisions: it is completely authentic and logical how the figures he creates think and see the world. The author often builds the psychological profile of the characters only from allusions, minor signals, and half-words; the recipient may feel that they know the thinking of his types intimately and precisely.” Besides humour and difficult fates, sexuality is given a prominent role (this is already apparent on the cover), and in the last cycle, intertextual games characteristic of the author since the start of his career also feature. János Arany, Kafka, Mór Jókai, Géza Csáth, and many others are evoked in this part, where essentially literature itself, the literary tradition, appears before the readers as the protagonist.
Apufoci (Football with Dad) is a collection of feuilletons divided into five cycles, in which an everyday life of becoming a family man and parent comes alive, primarily through a filter of the usual humour, with the (self-)ironic mode of speech so characteristic of the writer. The purchase of the first flat in Pest, mounting the bookshelf, matters around the children, school, adolescence, and residents' meetings are all experiences from the author's own personal life, in which he shows the minor calvaries of the average man, the beginning decline of the forty-year-old male body, but overall serenity flows from the entire volume, as one of its reviewers, István Kovács, formulated in the 2022/11 issue of Kortárs (Contemporary): “(…) life – viewed through Zsolt Koppány Nagy’s spectacles or contact lenses, deserving of a better fate – is pure serenity.” In the feuilletons, Zsolt Koppány Nagy introduces the reader into his own living space, his everyday life, showing the special perspective from which he typically views things, and while he makes us laugh with every little piece of writing, he caricatures himself and the world too, giving a kind of sketch of our age, of the events and absurdities of the world surrounding us in the given period.
The third volume published in 2021, A vendégmunkás (és a) dalai (The Migrant Worker and (His) Songs), was born from the connecting previously published texts and new parts; it is a book consisting of 5 chapters and a foreword. It presents scenes from the life of a Székely man arriving in Hungary in the form of short texts, where irony yet again takes on the main role. Homesickness and the experience of foreignness are the defining thematic elements; the absurd is characteristic of the volume, the subtitle of which is “song told in a tragedy”. This genre definition is also a kind of joke, as if playing with the genre designation of the ballad (tragedy told in song), inverting it in a rather absurd way, because really, how can a song be told in a tragedy? “Besides the experience of deprivation, serial humiliations dominate the stories; these hide in simple situations, when one has various social statuses (for example, if someone is a teacher, or indeed a migrant worker), but the spoken language carries the experience of outsiderness just the same,” writes Zsófia Pál Lukács about the volume in the 2022/2 issue of Bárka (Ark).
The Face of the Reader, the Journalist, the Editor, the Critic - – A remegő kezű órásmester (The Watchmaker with Trembling Hands)
The voluminous volume published in 2024, A remegő kezű órásmester (The Watchmaker with Trembling Hands), contains humoresques, feuilletons, reviews, essays, and critiques, arranged into three clearly distinguishable cycles. The first, entitled Savanyú kockacukor (Sour Sugar Cube), deals with the problems of writing, reading, and editing, i.e., the creative craft; the second, Cementfátyol (Cement Veil), contains primarily feuilletons; while in the third unit named Simogató ostorcsapás (Caressing Whiplash), the author collected reviews, essays, and critiques. The writings in the volume are largely pieces already published in journals and daily newspapers; a total of 222 longer and shorter texts were integrated into in the three cycles. Although the writings are largely not literary texts in the traditional sense, they still form an important part of the evolving career, as they reveal much about what and how Zsolt Koppány Nagy thinks about literature, public life, literary tendencies, or even his fellow writers and their works.
The uncertainty apparent in the title, the watchmaker working with trembling hands, is an excellent metaphor for the whole volume, which contemplates and questions rather than passes judgement, and which, according to the author's preface, is itself aware that opinion is not necessarily a static, unchangeable thing. In the third part, alongside radio critiques, we also find reviews written on volumes of world literature and anniversary articles familiar to those working in daily journalism. He writes about Sándor Tar, Imre Oravecz, Bulgakov, Lewis Carroll, Jonathan Swift, József Katona, and Mór Jókai, and introduces contemporary authors of world literature and their books from Lucia Berlin through Yu Hua to Cormac McCarthy. An astonishingly rich world is revealed, and what the author himself states in the volume's first piece is proven true: “I am an almost compulsively (okay: pathologically) heavy reader. I read at home in front of the TV, sitting at the laptop, at the kitchen table, at the pub table, and in the bathroom. I read to my daughter, my son, sometimes I read aloud to my wife. I entertain my friends with pieces that turned out remarkably well – and only rarely with my own. I read at my workplace, where I finish with the daily press in minutes (no wonder, of course), and I can finally deal with books again. While driving I listen to audiobooks, and if there is nothing else, I devour letters from electronic gadgets. I read on the tram too.” Reading the volume, it becomes clear that Zsolt Koppány Nagy moves in a vast reader's universe, and he confirms the seemingly very well-founded opinion that every good writer is at the same time an excellent reader.
[2024]