Dezső Kosztolányi - The Last Reading

Death will come, and how we experience it is perhaps coloured by how we have lived our life. These days we are more likely to die in a hospital room than anywhere else, our veins filled with drugs keeping us physical alive, our minds fogged with drugs keeping us mentally dull. What is life like, in those last hazy days?

I don't know, yet, but perhaps, for the narrator of Hungarian author Dezső Kosztolányi's short story, The Last Reading, it takes the form of a “last reading”, one final approach to the podium where he can expound upon that which has given meaning to his life: literature and his writings.

The story opens with two well used metaphors – traveling on a train and darkening night – to symbolise the approach of death. The story begins in a nostalgic key, lamenting missed opportunities and appreciating the melancholy of a day. There's more to it, of course, but the undercurrents are just that for the present; for now, Kosztolányi is content to create his character:

There is no finer experience of travel than to glance into an unfamiliar city, watch the children traipsing home from school on the snow-covered streets at sunset, steal a bit of community from their fraternal group, sniff out a restaurant, walk the length of the main street, then rush off to the hotel, preparing, and journeying onward the next day after a brief euphoria of applause and champagne as if the whole thing had been nothing more than a dream.

This long paragraph, which takes up perhaps a fifth of the story's entire length, can be seen as a writer's extended examination of and goodbye to the live he has lived. Kosztolányi layers on image after image, capturing in intense, short, clauses what it is to be a writer, in the abstract, “perfect” sense – the writer qua writer, writing about himself and writing about writing; he is, in effect, defining and accepting the life of literature he has led.

Two examples:

how I gave my expert's opinion, understated but admiring, on everything, me, who understands nothing but writing.

...amateur writers who handed me their manuscripts as if submitting some petition of vital importance to a king, bound with the roses of homage or slyly concealing a threat, like assassins would a dagger.

At the end of this long paragraph comes the sentence quoted far above: How lovely it would be to live yet a bit. And now the story darkens, and now the night deepens, and now the shades of death become concrete, bursting in on the story with increasing vigor. Kosztolányi's narrator becomes named: Cornelius Nightly, and the darkness of his last name should not become lost on the reader.

Madness intrudes, sharp spikes of it, which disrupt the thus-far melancholic story, tinging it with a form of skewed insanity. Nightly's hotel becomes infinite, it's corridors twisting and turning forever. The porters, servants and waiters, before so helpful, become sinister, pointing him in different directions, none of which are correct.

Somewhere towards the end a mirror glimmered dimly, reflecting the long, narrow corridor, with its grey carpeting and endless row of uniform grey doors. As he wanted to reach the stage as soon as possible, he hurried towards the mirror in the hope that he would find an exit or staircase. But he was disappointed. As he drew closer it became apparent that what he saw in the mirror was not a reflection, but rather reality. This corridor was endless. What grandiose pomp for the middle of nowhere, he grumbled, curling his lips into a frown. He hurried on with irritation. “Seems I have lost my way again,” he said, agitated…

The sad sense of literature leaves the story – there is nothing but frantic searching, now. Nightly distrusts himself and his environment, he cannot understand what is happening but he knows it isn't good. Kosztolányi proves quite adept at increasing tension; as his narrator becomes more agitated so, too, do we:

He lost his patience and, beside himself, began to dash to and fro, up and down, running from one floor to the next, but everywhere the disheartening labyrinth of uniformity awaited him. Eventually he began to pound on the iron railings of the elevator. The elevator stopped, the boy stepped out, and he stepped in. Again it began to soar upwards at a dizzying speed, then to plunge down for unbearably long minutes. Nightly stomped his feet and shouted that he wanted to get off.

he wanted to get off, and then suddenly he does. The story shifts, disappearing from Nightly, disappearing from literature, coalescing back into an ordinary hotel room, an ordinary world. The last part of the narrator's section is, He was surprised that this was all there was to the whole thing, and then he's gone, dead, left to be discovered by a boy and acknowledged as deceased by a doctor.

The Last Reading can be read as a goodbye to literature, a nightmare of corridors, doorways and unhelpful staff (think Kafka), and an extended metaphor for the last dying seconds of an intellectual lost in the works he has read. It is, in short, an excellent piece, and one of the few – very few – works of literature available in English by one of Hungary's greatest twentieth century writers.

The Last Reading by Dezső Kosztolányi is a short story from The Hungarian Quarterly, Vol. LI, No. 200, Winter 2010. While the Hungarian Quarterly is a print magazine, a selection of the texts are available online.

See Also

Also of interest: Index of short stories under review