The Case Worker

When Hungarian writer George Konrád, his sister and his parents returned to their hometown of Berettyóújfalu in 1945 they were the only Jewish family to have survived the war intact. Their troubles were not over, however, as his father’s business was soon appropriated by the new Communist government. Despite this, Konrád chose to remain in Hungary in 1956 and eventually, after various short-term jobs, worked for seven years as a social worker focusing on children’s welfare from 1959. Ten years later his first novel, The Case Worker, was published, drawing heavily on these experiences. It was translated into English in 1974 by Paul Aston as part of Philip Roth’s Writers from the Other Europe series, and, though this is not the only edition, it has been out of print for decades.

This might be partly explained by the fact that it is one of the most depressing novels you are likely to encounter. Narrated by a case (or social) worker who is tasked with aiding the dregs of society, and who himself undergoes a crisis in the course of the novel, it observes the very worst of humanity and offers little, if anything, in the way of hope or redemption. As Irving Howe explains in his introduction, where other writers have included characters from this underclass:

“Konrád was perhaps the first to place them in a distinctive contemporary setting as the ‘clients’ of a social welfare system that is overwhelmed by their needs and clamour, and proceeds to slot them into categories, hospitals, files and clinics, attempting through society’s benevolence or callousness to cope with the gratuitous cruelties of nature.”

In such circumstances a case worker cannot help but harden their heart as Konrád makes clear in the opening paragraph:

“He thinks his situation is desperate; seems perfectly normal to me. He swears his cross is too heavy; seems quite bearable to me. He hints at suicide; I let it pass. He thinks I can save him; I can’t tell him how wrong he is.”

The narrator describes his job as being like “swallowing fistful of mud; I can neither digest it or vomit it up.” The novel opens with a series of ‘cases’, the overwhelming nature of his task emphasised by the frequent use of lists. In one example, he imagines what sounds might originate from a filing cabinet containing all his cases:

“Children’s cries, woman’s moans, resounding blows, quarrels, obscenities, recriminations, interrogations, hasty decisions, false testimony, administrative platitudes, jovial police slang, judges’ verdicts, the vapid chatter of female supervisors, the incantations of psychologists, my colleagues’ embittered humour, my own solitary invective, and so on and so on.”

We are soon introduced to the particular case at the heart of the novel, the Bandulas, who have committed suicide by poison. The narrator already knows the couple, and we learn that they lost their daughter during the war, and that afterwards their house was nationalised (as happened to Konrád’s family) and tenants moved into some of the rooms. Bandula is denounced by one of the tenants for hording jewellery and imprisoned, eventually returning home with “his mind unhinged” and taking to drink. They have another child, a boy, Feri, but he is born both physically and mentally disabled. The narrator first sees him while his parents are still alive:

“Feri was stamping about in his crib on an excrement-stained nylon sheet strewn with apple cores, cabbage stalks, carrot ends, a bare rib of mutton, and various unidentifiable scraps of meat. It was the same carpet of miscellaneous garbage as in the monkey house at the zoo.”

The narrator is tasked with taking the child to an institution where he will “disappear through the trap door leading to the repository for infantile rubbish…” He describes in detail the journey and the institution itself up to the point he waves a “token farewell” but we find him waking the next morning in the Bandula’s room with Feri “asleep in his ramshackle bed.” His decision is instinctive rather than rational; “it is not duty that keeps me here,” he says but, even though he knows he can walk away at any moment, “this chid has undeniably become my lot.”

Konrád frequently uses war imagery to describe the situation the narrator finds himself in. The room is “a house abandoned the previous night by drunken soldiers”; the cases he deals with are people who “live in a state of perpetual siege”; the case worker is a “neutral but armed observer.” Now it seems, he wants to experience the life of the observed, however artificial he knows this is. This highlights that, beneath the cynicism, the novel retains, if not hope, at least some faint belief in humanity. Ultimately, The Case Worker is a cry of rage rather than despair at the suffering that surrounds us and the state’s ineffectual attempts to relive it, a lesson that goes beyond any particular time or place.

The Midnight Timetable

The Midnight Timetable is the latest collection of short stories / novel from Bora Chung translated by Anton Hur. Connected by a mysterious Institute and a narrator who is employed there, the stories are also linked via certain reported elements, yet, at the same time, each one stands alone quite comfortably. In an afterword, Chung recounts how enjoyable she finds writing ghost stories, remarking that they are a “good method of overcoming” writer’s block:

“Midnight Timetable was not a deadline or a chore for me, but a really fun amusement park of a book to work on.”

Despite the eerie atmosphere which pervades this volume, that pleasure is communicated in the flow of both the prose and the ideas, which are less demanding than Chung’s other work. The Institute houses a collection of supernatural objects, each with a story attached. These are revealed to us via a narrator which has recently joined to work the nightshift, who hears them for a ‘sunbae’ or senior member of staff (it’s not entirely clear why this word remains untranslated unless simply to add to the mystery) assigned with “showing [him] the ropes.” The physical unreliability of the Institute is introduced via a cleaning lady who meets a mysterious figure (“utterly nondescript”) who prevents her from entering underground car park, only to discover that going back up the stairs takes her down to the parking lot. Both the stairs and the figure will appear in a later story.

Rather than horrifying, the stories seek to unsettle the reader. In the first chapter another employee of the Institute, Chan, finds himself driving through a tunnel that gets longer the further he drives. A phone rings and, when he answers it, asks him, “Aren’t you about to be deceased?” In this case, however, the haunting prompts him to rethink his life as at…

“…the desperate moment he wanted to reach out to someone for help, how his desperation and will to live had focused on a single person.”

Moral lessons are never far from the supernatural occurrences Chung recounts. In ‘Handkerchief’ the titular object takes on significance when the second daughter insists that her mother’s last wish was to be buried with it. Her siblings agree, apart from the younger son who has relied on his mother throughout his life:

“He insisted the handkerchief was his. Wasn’t he the one who had talked to his mother the most, the one to whom she had given every object of value that ever passed through her hands?”

On this occasion he is overruled and the obsession he develops with possessing the handkerchief will prove his undoing. Things also do not turn out well for DSP, introduced in ‘Cursed Sheep’ as running a “streaming channel that specialized in ghostly spectra and other paranormal phenomena” who has sought a job at the Institute in search of content. He makes the mistake of removing an object from the Institute, a tennis shoe with a picture of a sheep on it, and he, too, receives calls foretelling his death:

“What time will you board the hearse?”

A sheep also features in ‘Silence of the Sheep’ (therefore fully justifying the cover design which echoes that of Cursed Bunny). Here its ghostly presence enables the deputy director (in her past life) to tell the future. Again, there is a moral dimension as the sheep is one of a group which has been experimented on, first spotted in a field near the veterinary school:

“The sheep were covered in wounds. Their wool was shorn bald in different places, and there were surgical looking wounds in those spots.”

Both ‘Bluebird’ and ‘Why Does the Cat’ might be considered revenge stories. The first is a historical tale which features the handkerchief from earlier; the second is a more modern story about a man who murders his wife and gets away with it:

“As with many murders where the reason is stated to be ‘She refused to see me,’ the incident was considered compulsive and unpremeditated in a court of law or by law enforcement.”

Chung uses the ironic haunting of the dead wife to highlight a misogynistic application of law. There is a hint to Chung’s wider intention in the book’s final story, ‘Sunning Day’, when the objects are taken outside for one day, when the narrator states:

“We return to the work of protecting the undead from the terrors of our daylight world.”

Generally, it is the actions of the living that are to feared rather than their supernatural consequences. This is delightful selection of ghost stories which are playful and imaginative enough to always entertain without being too gruesome for gentler minds.