The Melancholy of Resistance

Set in a small, unnamed town on the southern Hungarian lowlands during a period of social decay, the novel follows several townsfolk as a mysterious traveling circus arrives in the dead of winter, triggering events that expose the fragility of civic order, personal belief, and human connection.

The story opens with Mrs. Plauf, a fastidious widow, struggling to return home on an emergency train after visiting her elderly sisters. The scheduled service has failed, a symptom of the chaos overtaking daily life. In a garlic-scented carriage packed with peasants, she endures a harrowing encounter with an unshaven man who follows her to the washroom and pounds on the door, leaving her feeling violated. She arrives almost two hours late to a town plunged into darkness. Sinister phenomena line her route home: shadows silently beating someone near an artesian well, an enormous truck sheathed in corrugated iron hauled by a smoking tractor. An advertising pillar announces "The Biggest Whale in the World, and other sensational secrets of nature" (34-35), to be exhibited in Kossuth Square. Mrs. Plauf is appalled that a circus has been permitted in a town on the verge of anarchy.

She takes refuge in her meticulously ordered apartment and discards a note from her estranged son Valuska, whom she considers a degenerate vagrant resembling his alcoholic father. Valuska also serves as a devoted helper to the reclusive musicologist György Eszter. Mrs. Plauf's peace shatters when Mrs. Eszter, György's estranged wife, forces her way in uninvited. Mrs. Eszter, a formidable, physically imposing woman who has leveraged her relationship with the chief of police to gain local political power, reveals her scheme: The town needs György, a bedridden recluse on Wenckheim Avenue, to serve as figurehead for a civic renewal campaign called A Tidy Yard, An Orderly House. Only Valuska can persuade him. She plans to blackmail her husband using a suitcase of laundry regularly sent through Valuska, in which she has packed her own clothes to signal she can move back in at any time. Mrs. Plauf refuses. Mrs. Eszter storms out with a warning about "new times just around the corner" (51).

Walking home, Mrs. Eszter surveys the town's decay with satisfaction, regarding it as the harbinger of a new order. In Kossuth Square, dozens of silent strangers stand in the cold, outsiders drawn by the whale. At dawn, she packs the suitcase and seeks out Valuska.

The narrative shifts to the Peafeffer bar, where Valuska performs his nightly ritual: a demonstration of a solar eclipse using patrons as celestial bodies. A thin, crook-backed man who owns nothing beyond his postman's cloak and bag, Valuska has wandered these streets since childhood in a state of cosmic wonder, regarded by townsfolk as a harmless eccentric. He narrates the eclipse with prophetic intensity, producing a half-minute of genuine silence in the crowded bar. In the early morning, he visits the circus wagon and encounters the hulk of a dried whale on a low platform, so enormous he cannot see it all at once. He is mesmerized by the knowledge that this creature of distant oceans is tangible and present. The other visitors, however, fixate on a door at the wagon's rear, drawn by some unseen presence.

Mrs. Eszter manipulates Valuska into carrying the suitcase to Eszter's house, claiming she wants to showcase her husband's qualities. The bedridden musicologist lies on a chaise-longue in a dusty drawing room of decaying inherited splendor. His backstory reveals the discovery that shattered his worldview: The Werckmeister harmonies, a system of equal temperament introduced in 1691 by the organ-master Andreas Werckmeister, divided the octave into twelve equal half-tones rather than the mathematically pure ratios of natural tuning. This revelation destroyed Eszter's belief that music represented perfection; he concluded music was a disguise for human failure and retuned his Steinway to pure pitch as penance, playing it daily as self-punishment.

Eszter perceives the blackmail but yields, and the two set out together for his first excursion in months. Shocked by the frozen armor of rubbish covering every surface, Eszter perceives for the first time Valuska's vulnerability, this innocent creature wandering through a lethal landscape. He delegates the civic movement to three desperate local citizens and, at their parting, makes Valuska swear to return.

Valuska re-enters the wagon and overhears an argument between the circus director and a figure called The Prince, a being who speaks only in chirps translated by a massive factotum. The Prince demands to address the crowd, declaring he recognizes no superior authority and that "the whole does not exist" (163-168). The director capitulates. Valuska flees in terror to Mrs. Eszter's crisis committee but is dismissed. Sent to care for the chief of police's two small children, he finds the boys armed with weapons including a real revolver. Looking toward the city center, he sees a reddish glow above the rooftops.

At Eszter's gate, a man from the square puts his arm around Valuska and whispers, "Don't be afraid. You're coming with us" (185-186). Valuska is swept into the mob's rampage: shops are smashed, the telephone exchange wrecked, patients tipped from hospital beds. In one ransacked house, he fixes his eyes on a bare, sour-smelling corner of a room, and this image burns into his consciousness, obliterating his cosmic vision. He convinces himself the universe he loved has vanished, replaced by a world governed solely by brute force.

At dawn, tanks arrive. Harrer, Valuska's landlord, finds him near the station and warns that his name is on the army's wanted list. The chief of police's two boys appear in oversized police tunics, thrown out by their deranged father. They follow Valuska along the railway tracks in silence.

Meanwhile, Eszter barricades his windows and undergoes a philosophical revolution through the physical labor, discovering that the intellect is not the controller of experience but its shadow. Harrer's wife arrives with devastating news: Valuska was seen among the rioters, and Mrs. Plauf stormed out to drag her son from the mob and has not returned. Eszter rushes out and finds Mrs. Plauf's body in the street, strangled. A soldier marches him to the town hall for interrogation. Harrer whispers that Valuska is alive and fleeing along the tracks. When Valuska's name arises, Mrs. Eszter intervenes, declaring him mentally deficient. The colonel orders him committed to the asylum. Eszter walks home and spends three hours retuning his piano back to the Werckmeister equal-tempered scale, playing the first chords of the Prelude in B Major, a quiet reversal of his years of punitive pure tuning.

The final section, set fourteen days later, reveals Mrs. Eszter's total consolidation of power as the town's new secretary. She deliberately delayed calling for military reinforcements, calculating the precise point between too little destruction to justify a power grab and too much to survive. She kept the chief of police drunk, directed Harrer to silence Valuska by sending him out of town, and seduced the colonel. Every exile and appointment has proceeded by her design. Valuska sits in the asylum's secure ward, unable to open his eyes. Eszter, banished to the servants' quarters, visits him daily in silence, holding his hand. Mrs. Eszter presides over Mrs. Plauf's funeral, delivering a propagandistic eulogy that reframes the murdered woman's desperate attempt to save her son as deliberate heroic resistance.

The novel concludes with an extended, clinical account of biological decomposition, following Mrs. Plauf's body at the biochemical level. Ammonia oxidizes in the soil and creeps up the roots of plants; carbon dioxide enters the air. The realm that existed "once and once only" has disappeared, but not one atom has been lost. The chaos "which consisted of an indifferent and unstoppable traffic between things" has ground everything to nothing, and the novel's final sentence declares this force "must also consume this book, here, now, at the full stop, after the last word."