Ready to dig deep? The narrator of Panni Puskás’s novel That Any Might Be Saved is, as demonstrated by this dizzying excerpt, brilliantly translated from the Hungarian by Austin Wagner. Asked by their psychotherapist to recall their childhood, the narrator draws up their very first memory: a tantrum provoked by their inability to find a plastic ball to play with. From here the narrator’s monologue unfurls in a dazzling spiral, transitioning seamlessly from their childhood recollections to their frustrating relationship with their perpetually unemployed friend and finally to the liberatory violence of vandalism and of the destruction of their mother’s possessions—an apparent rejection of their own richly remembered past, which frees them from the strictures of polite society and psychotherapy alike. Read on!
Posts by Austin Wagner
Translation Tuesday: An Excerpt from That Any Might Be Saved by Panni Puskás
I told them no mercy, you must be destroyed, because violence is the only path to happiness