If there’s a genre for translated novels featuring dentistry, early April must be the prime publication slot. While there’s little else to connect these two novels, they got me wondering about teeth in fiction and I couldn’t resist pairing them here. Fever at Dawn is published this week in hardback, while The Story of My Teeth first appeared in English in 2015 and comes out in paperback this week.
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In 1945, soon after the liberation of the concentration camps, hundreds of survivors are shipped to Sweden for treatment and rehabilitation. Miklós is one of the sickest and soon he’s diagnosed with TB and given six months to live. (He’s also given a set of ugly metal teeth to replace those forcibly extracted during his imprisonment.) Determined not to die, he acquires the names and addresses of the 117 women from his hometown in Hungary who are also convalescing in Sweden and writes a letter to every one. Very quickly he’s decided it’s Lili he’s going to marry and he’s not going to let the geographical distance between them get in the way.
I was interested to learn about a regime that mixed compassion with a surprising amount of military-style regulation, the patients dressed in striped uniforms reminiscent of the camps, and with a strict gender segregation similar to that in the asylum of The Ballroom. However, based on the true story of the author’s parents, I found the story behind the story much more interesting than the novel itself. The lack of character depth led me to wonder if it’s generally more difficult to fictionalise our parents than to fictionalise ourselves, although Richard Flanagan pulled this off beautifully in The Narrow Road to the Deep North which confronts another harrowing Second World War experience. Nevertheless, interesting to read a second Hungarian novel close on the heels of Journey by Moonlight. Described by the publisher Doubleday as ‘The No.1 European bestseller’ (giving me licence to criticise it more than I might other debuts) and soon to be released as a film, I had to go to Goodreads for the name of the translator (Elizabeth Szász) and date of first publication (2010) as this wasn’t mentioned on my proof copy.
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As a child, Gustavo Sánchez Sánchez, also known as Highway, collected his father’s nail clippings which landed on his exercise book as he was doing his homework. There followed a lifetime of collecting, not just the objects themselves, but the stories associated with them, which became his trademark in his profession as an auctioneer. His success in this role earned him the money to replace his troublesome teeth with a set said to have belonged to Marilyn Monroe. He then offers some of his originals in a “hyperbolic auction” in which they’re attributed to various historical and literary figures from Plato to Virginia Woolf, until his son exacts revenge for Highway’s absence from his childhood.
If this story weren’t quirky enough it’s riddled with cultural references and related in a series of short “books” interspersed with epigraphs and parables from Chinese fortune cookies. As any hint of post-modernism is my number one reason for giving up on a novel, discovering these, plus the chronology supplied by the translator, Christina MacSweeney, and the photographs of places referenced in Highway’s account, as I flicked through the pages prior to reading, tempted me to demote the book to the darkest depths of my TBR pile. But the humour, and sheer bonkosity of the intertwined stories, saw me through to the author’s afterword. Here she explains that the “novel-essay” that is The Story of My Teeth is the result of a collaborative project with the workers of the juice factory which features in the novel for an exhibition on our relationship to art. Blooming marvellous! Since it was written for collective reading, this would be perfect for book groups. Thanks to Granta for my review copy.
I was interested to learn about a regime that mixed compassion with a surprising amount of military-style regulation, the patients dressed in striped uniforms reminiscent of the camps, and with a strict gender segregation similar to that in the asylum of The Ballroom. However, based on the true story of the author’s parents, I found the story behind the story much more interesting than the novel itself. The lack of character depth led me to wonder if it’s generally more difficult to fictionalise our parents than to fictionalise ourselves, although Richard Flanagan pulled this off beautifully in The Narrow Road to the Deep North which confronts another harrowing Second World War experience. Nevertheless, interesting to read a second Hungarian novel close on the heels of Journey by Moonlight. Described by the publisher Doubleday as ‘The No.1 European bestseller’ (giving me licence to criticise it more than I might other debuts) and soon to be released as a film, I had to go to Goodreads for the name of the translator (Elizabeth Szász) and date of first publication (2010) as this wasn’t mentioned on my proof copy.
############################################################
As a child, Gustavo Sánchez Sánchez, also known as Highway, collected his father’s nail clippings which landed on his exercise book as he was doing his homework. There followed a lifetime of collecting, not just the objects themselves, but the stories associated with them, which became his trademark in his profession as an auctioneer. His success in this role earned him the money to replace his troublesome teeth with a set said to have belonged to Marilyn Monroe. He then offers some of his originals in a “hyperbolic auction” in which they’re attributed to various historical and literary figures from Plato to Virginia Woolf, until his son exacts revenge for Highway’s absence from his childhood.
If this story weren’t quirky enough it’s riddled with cultural references and related in a series of short “books” interspersed with epigraphs and parables from Chinese fortune cookies. As any hint of post-modernism is my number one reason for giving up on a novel, discovering these, plus the chronology supplied by the translator, Christina MacSweeney, and the photographs of places referenced in Highway’s account, as I flicked through the pages prior to reading, tempted me to demote the book to the darkest depths of my TBR pile. But the humour, and sheer bonkosity of the intertwined stories, saw me through to the author’s afterword. Here she explains that the “novel-essay” that is The Story of My Teeth is the result of a collaborative project with the workers of the juice factory which features in the novel for an exhibition on our relationship to art. Blooming marvellous! Since it was written for collective reading, this would be perfect for book groups. Thanks to Granta for my review copy.
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