Introductory remarks by Professor Ivan Sanders to a reading in October  2003, at Columbia University, given jointly by Ferenc Barnás and translator  Paul Olchváry

Ferenc Barnás’s Az élősködő (The Parasite) is one of the most unusual and unnerving novels I have ever read in any language. Only in the most cursory way is it rooted in time and place, though it could be argued that its particular preoccupations (which are spiritual and philosophical, appearing in the guise of an elaborate compendium of mostly sexual obsessions) betray its provenance-an atomized, inchoate postcommunist East Central Europe. (The novel is such, however, that the reader need not be aware of this.) Yet, in spite of stray references to Kant and Nietzsche and the Marquis de Sade, this is not a philosophical novel; neither is it, for all its resemblance to a case study in abnormal psychology, a psychological novel. It is, rather, a compelling, sophisticated, often abstruse exploration of the Self, a profound meditation on the communicability of real and imagined experience. Its language is powerful, evocative, (the author’s knowledge of the real world comes through in his metaphors), even when dealing with high abstractions, which is often.

The central consciousness is that of an unnamed young man who is real enough, even if we do see him through the distorting mirror of his obsessions and morbid fantasies. He is the parasite, feeding off other people’s physical and psychological ailments; but he is also a host who attracts people with the most peculiar quirks and manias. In the first few chapters the hero recalls (almost amiably at this point) that as a young adolescent he had a decadent attraction to illnesses, doctors, and hospitals; he loved staying in various wards, and feigned symptoms in the hope of ending up, even if for a short time, in a hospital bed. The real descent into his private hell begins after his first sexual experience. He first becomes a compulsive masturbator, with the photograph of a chance acquaintance serving as his stimulus, and then a compulsive fornicator. But our hero realizes, to his horror, that casual sex for him is not casual at all. Each one-night stand results in bouts of insane jealousy. Lovemaking becomes an ordeal, yet he can neither abstain nor help imagine previous lovers hovering over him every time he makes love to a woman.

When he gets to know L., a woman with whom he is destined to have a more meaningful relationship, he thinks his demons may have finally ceased tormenting him. But then she confesses that before they met (apparently because she had been a rape victim), she had slept with a different man every night for a whole year. The demons, the apparitions, the gnawing jealousy return with a vengeance. He seeks relief in confabulation: he writes a narrative of L.’s sexual encounters, of her strategies for choosing men for her nightly amorous adventures. After much trepidation and long ruminations on the life of the written word, the way words shape and change reality independent of their author, he presents L. with the manuscript. The novel ends with her starting to read its pages.

There is no resolution, no catharsis in this strange novel, yet Barnás manages to create in it an aesthetic of morbidity. There are Dostoevskian visions of suffering and degradation here, and there is certainly madness (in one dream sequence the narrator literally skins himself alive), and also intellectual fervor (stunning little essays on music, on odors, on the mechanics of perception, etc.), but it all arrives-sensuous metaphors notwithstanding-in cold, precise, analytical prose. The book’s eroticism-alas, one is almost tempted to say-is also glacial.

All in all, this is a tough book to get through; but once read, it holds you captive.