The book was originally published in Hungarian in 1998 and earned instant success for the freshness of its then 28-year-old author’s vision and the exciting approach inherent in the tension between the rigidity of the chosen form and the rambling style. Also, the book was colourful and full of pictures, a real visual feast for the Hungarian reader unused to such designs for works of contemporary literature. The experimental approach of the young author earned him comparisons to Andy Warhol (Arnon Grunberg) and Jean-Arthur Rimbaud (Yuriy Andrukhovich). Ever since, The Last Window-Giraffe has been translated into 18 languages and has also been adapted to a multilingual new media CD-ROM by the author.
The title, which conjures up surrealistic images for the non-Hungarian reader, strikes very different chords for Hungarians, especially those brought up in the 70s and the 80s. Window-Giraffe (Ablak-Zsiráf, the first and the last word) is the title of a picture dictionary compiled by two eminent psychologists for first and second graders. With its 1,300 definitions and illustrations, it is a lexicon of the daily life of that era in the Eastern bloc. As the writer recounts, ”the window giraffe was a picture book from which we learned to read when we didn't know how to. We learned from it that the sun rises in the east, that our hearts are on the left, that the Great October Revolution was in November, and that light comes through the window, even when it is closed. The window giraffe was full of seven-headed dragons, fairies, devils and princes, and they told us that they do not exist. I remember four kinds of dragons that do not exist, and also three princes. Syllable by syllable, the window giraffe taught us to read between the lines...”
The orderliness of the world suggested by his Window-Giraffe as well as by the official regime is gradually questioned by the child as he grows up, and the awakening culminates in the Belgrade protests that brought down Milošević’s regime and in which the author tried to relive all the protests of his youth in Budapest and elsewhere – the real and the imaginary ones – that brought down the soft dictatorships of Eastern Europe. What he has to say breaks the rigid form wide open at each and every point, just as the child brought up in the infantilizing atmosphere of ”goulash communism” struggles hard to break open the eggshell and become an adult.
Born in 1970, Péter Zilahy lives in Budapest. He is also the author of a book of poems (Statue Under a White Sheet Ready to Jump, 1993), a book of short prose, Drei (2003), published in German, and a collection of diverse pieces entitled Three Plus One (2007). He is a regular contributor to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, the Tagesspiegel and Die Welt.
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