When one speaks of a short story collection as “loosely linked” there is often the implication that some kind of continuous theme, or even set of characters, connecting the individual pieces to a greater or lesser extent. Krisztina Tóth’s debut collection, Barcode, originally published in Hungary in 2006, is a little different in this respect. The narrators or protagonists are all Hungarian, and timewise, their settings are in keeping with the age of the author who was born in 1970, but, even if some stories may contain possible biographical elements, the voices and circumstances do not suggest that all, or even any of the fifteen feature the same character. Rather, what connects the stories of these girls and women is a motif—all contain reference to a “line” or “lines” of some kind as noted in the story’s subtitle. We find borderlines, blood lines, grid lines, baseline, the line’s busy, and so on. It is a interesting way of providing continuity to a varied collection of tales. In fact, in her introduction, Tímea Turi tells us that the first element of the Hungarian word for “barcode” translates as “line.” Thus, each piece has something to say about the lines that define, restrict, or even scar us.
One can also say that the collection of stories in Barcode cross the “line” marking the end of Communism in Eastern Europe and its replacement with democratically elected governments— a line that corresponds with, as it would for Tóth herself, the end of adolescence and the beginning of early adulthood. The harbinger of that transition in Hungary is observed in “Outline Map (Life Line)” as a young university student on a fateful visit to a summer cottage with her first boyfriend remarks:
It was 32 degrees; we slathered each other with suntan lotion as we watched the TV. The General Secretary of the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party János Kádár has died. Actually, I felt rather sorry for him. Sorry that I would no longer be hearing his name in the news bulletins, sorry that the landscape of our childhood would soon disappear, that the crêperie shack on Kálvin Square had been demolished and that entire blocks of houses were disappearing, that the streets twisted and turned in odd directions, that in the sequence of events some kind of curious, unbridgeable gap was being created.
The stories set in childhood reflect Hungary of the 1970s and 80s—contaminated housing estates, a military style summer camp, an idealized fascination with “the West”—whereas the stories with adult protagonists deal with the demands of career, relationships, and motherhood, sometimes even venturing beyond Hungary, to Japan and Paris, for instance, where, if anything, the characters’ Hungarian identities are even more evident in contrast to their foreign surroundings.
The majority of the stories in Barcode are first person monologues with unnamed narrators, who have strong, distinctive voices. They are often seeking to understand and define themselves within their families, their romantic relationships (and infatuations) and within their communities. They may be speaking to immediate events or looking back at their younger, more naïve selves, sometimes with considerable insight. In one of my favourite stories, “The Pencil Case (Guidelines),” a girl recounts her primary school experiences at a time when “the colour both of our gowns and our copy books was indigo.” The narrative cleverly captures a shift in self awareness that occurs when she is wrongly accused of tripping a classmate, but allows herself to take the blame—in her retelling there is suddenly both an “I” and a “she” who becomes separated from her own name and identity and remains that way:
Later, too, the body belonging to the name continued to say nothing, responding with an obstinate silence and a blank, unflinching stare to the teacher’s interrogation, and as for the name, she began to hear it as casually and forgetfully as her cardigan and the PE kit she invariably left behind somewhere or other. She became an actor in that weird film witnessed in the schoolyard, which the I had seen and in which she had been found guilty and which from this day on I, the name, had consistently to bear through all the indigo days that followed.
Her circumstances so clearly reflect the way many a shy child manages to navigate a system—grade school—in which they are out of place and unable to speak for themselves.
Although the stories are not organized in a strictly chronological fashion in this volume, they generally move from childhood through adolescence to adulthood, the latter stories tending to feature the more mature protagonists. Here strained romances, pregnancy, miscarriage, and self-image take the place of childhood joys and fears. As in “What’s this Mark Here? (Bikini Line),” where a woman traces the history of her relationship to her body from her first bathing suit through to childbirth via caesarean section. The pictures she draws along the way are vivid:
My first swimsuit isn’t a swimsuit. It’s a pair of trunks. At that age there’s no big difference between boys and girls: it’s just chubby, flat-footed kids’ bodies running about on the sands. The sun shines. I’m crouched down by a wooden tub, blinking into the camera. It must have been lovely in the hot sand. I show the photo to my son. Mum, he says, that isn’t you, that’s a little girl. Indeed: am I really me? In the background a fleshy female leg in slippers consisting of two blue crossed strips of rubber: beach slippers. The legs belong to my grandmother, who would soon take a step or two into the water, pulling a rubber dinghy. We are sailing.
Fifteen stories, fifteen girls and women, each growing up and finding their way. Tóth’s poetic background (she was a well-established poet when this book first came out) serves her well as she crafts memorable portraits of female life in Hungary and beyond. More than a decade and a half after first publication, they speak to timeless aspects of female experience. And, no review would be complete without mentioning the striking presentation of this volume with barcode-like like lines across the top and bottom of each page and unique designs setting off each tale.
Barcode: Fifteen Stories by Krisztina Tóth is translated from the Hungarian by Peter Sherwood and published by Jantar Publishing.
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