(Find me at 50 Watts Books.)

I combined a handful of archival posts on Hungarian author Frigyes Karinthy,
author of A Journey Round My Skull. They make more sense together.

August 5th, 2007:
I just discovered this fantastic cover by Lilla Lorant for the 1965 Corvina English-language edition of Karinthy's Voyage to Faremido, Gulliver's Fifth Voyage (published 1916) and Capillaria, Gulliver's Sixth Voyage (published 1921). (Notice the legs in the bottom right-hand corner.) The translation is by Paul Tabori. His introduction, written in 1964, is one of the longest pieces in English about Karinthy (13 pages in a tiny font in the NEL edition). NEL published a paperback reprint in 1978 (with generic spaceship cover).

Here is Karoly Szalay (can't find any info in English about Szalay) on Voyage to Faremido and Capillaria, from his afterword to Grave and Gay:

All of Karinthy's work during this period [ed: WWI, Karinthy was in his early 20s] was inspired by humanism and antimilitarism. His novel Voyage to Faremido (Utazas Faremidoba) satirizes war hysteria; in his poems, sketches and plays he derides the exploiters of war, the politicians and the military leaders. He wanted neither the war nor the revolution, yet he sympathized with the revolution in Russia, since it held out the prospect of peace. 1918–19 were the years of demilitarization, revolution and counter-revolution in Hungary. By the beginning of the twenties Karinthy was a disillusioned, apprehensive, despondent man; it can be seen from his fantasy novel Capillaria and his Rope Walking, the latter a work full of obscure symbols and—for lack of better analogy—let us say Kafkaesque visions.

I haven't read all the books I'm listing on this blog (including this one and Karinthy's Grave and Gay, which I'll discuss in the next post). I realized that I gather a lot of information about books before I buy them, but never record this research. Writing about books in my collection is forcing me to research them again. This time I'll have a record. When I do finally get a chance to read the book, I'll re-post the entry with my comments. [9/13/11 update: as my mom would say, "Fat chance."]

back cover

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August 9, 2007: The Hungarian publisher Corvina published Grave and Gay: Selections from his Work in 1973. The binding and jacket are by Istvan Banyai (creator of Zoom; bio here). The volume was edited by Istvan Kerekgyarto. It includes an afterword (titled "About the Author") by Karoly Szalay.

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This French edition uses an image by
Robert and Shana ParkeHarrison
(thank you to Blog des Mardis hongrois de Paris)

October 5, 2007: I just found out there is a 1970 film version of Utazás a koponyám körül. IMDB says it is "also known as" Trip Around My Cranium in the US. It's a little hard to believe that was the title chosen, especially because the book had been translated in the 1930s and given the far superior title A Journey Round My Skull.

Get in touch if you've ever seen this and can comment on it. I'm wondering if it was dubbed into English and played in a grindhouse, or maybe screened with Eyes without a Face as a double-feature on college campuses around Halloween. And I want to know what they did with the "Avdeling 13" chapter.

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November 1, 2007: Here's another French edition. It was translated by Françoise Vernan and includes a preface by Pierre Karinthy (I assume he's the son of the author). The other French edition was translated by "J. and P. Karinthy." I don't know the story behind either.

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October 31, 2007: Here's a nice cover for a 1980 edition of Voyage to Faremido in Esperanto.

I sometimes feel like I'm wallowing in obscure books, but a book has to be pretty popular to make it into Esperanto!

Will the amazing musician and language condensor Alan Bryant produce a phonetic edition of A Journey Round My Skull in my lifetime? Sample of Bryant's "condensation" [note that "7" means "the"]: "Booklet reprints prime Bryant rants on church/state separation ('TH' 10 GRAETST AMERICNZ WR AGENST ORGANYZD RLIJN (OR)'), questionable medical practices ('SRCMSIZHN(S)-ITS DUN FOR MNI($)!'), the IBM theft of Apple technologies ('Just lyc Bill Gates mest up 7 Mac sstm, wich hi stol, n Uzd a cAmplx DOS sstm t mc it a mes U had t go t school t lrn, n wth cn upgrEdz ($)'), and quantum physics ('invent betr fzcl-xpl'nESnz 7an PAW, jumps, chans Es, Its bcm a stuupid wrd.')."

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Please Sir! (Tanár Úr Kérem, 1916)
English-language edition by Istvan Farkas (Corvina, 1968)
Foreword by Endre Illes.
Jacket design by Istvan Hegedus
Part of the UNESCO collection of representative works

November 2, 2007

From the front flap:

"Frigyes Karinthy (1887–1938) was one of the most original and prolific Hungarian writers in this century, a rationalist genius with a keen eye for the paradoxical traits and absurdities in man's nature. With such a gift he easily became a great comic writer. His art is rooted in the atmosphere of the Budapest literary cafes; his wit made him a legendary figure still in his life. The most natural medium of Karinthy's art is the sketch and the essay though he also wrote a novel-like record of his brain operation. This was Journey around My Skull, a tour de force of self analysis and black humour, which was published in English by Faber in 1942 [ed: I think it was '39?]..."

While searching for confirmation of the illustrator of this cover, I found a nice tidbit about Karinthy: "He was the very successful Hungarian translator of Winnie the Pooh."

This book is actually available free online.

Entry on Karinthy from the Columbia Dictionary of Modern European Literature.

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March 27, 2008: The NYRB edition of Frigyes Karinthy's A Journey Round My Skull came out this month. The cover photograph is "Halo" by Alice Attie.

Here's an excerpt from it (I now realize I need to start including excerpts for these posts): "Behind the walls of my skull something was happening. What it was I knew less than anyone. Even the others could do no more than guess. Those walls enclosed a soft, rubber-like mass the convulsions and yellowish-white colour of which are so strikingly similar to the kernel of a walnut as almost to convey a warning. At one particular point in this mass a process of some kind was beginning. For the moment it was impossible to say where it started."

Oliver Sacks' new introduction is fantastic. He discusses in depth some of the medical details in the book. He ends his piece:

"I first read A Journey Round My Skull as a boy of thirteen or fourteen—I think it influenced me, when I came to write my own neurological case histories [Ed. note: YA Librarians, this means you need to buy the book for your library]—and now, rereading it sixty years later, I think it stands up remarkably well. It is not just an elaborate case history; it depicts the complex impact of a sight-, mind-, and life-threatening illness in a man of extraordinary sensibility and talent, and even something approaching genius, in the prime of his life. It becomes a journey of insight, of symbolic stages. It has its faults: there are long digressions, philosophical and literary, and there is a certain amount of fanciful contrivance and extravagance [Ed note: if you are reading this particular blog, you probably agree that these are assets, not flaws!]—though this is something that Karinthy becomes more and more conscious of as he writes the book, as he is sobered by his experience, and as he tried to weld his novelistic imagination to the factual, even the clinical, realities of his situation. But despite its flaws, Karinthy's book is, to my mind, a masterpiece. We are inundated now with medical memoirs, both biographical and autobiographical—the entire genre has exploded in the last twenty years. Yet even though medical technology may have changed, the human experience has not, and A Journey Round My Skull, the first autobiographical description of a journey inside the brain, remains one of the very best."

In my first post, I wondered about the rights issue with this book. It looks like Editions Denoel in Paris has them. I was clearly looking in the wrong place. (For the record, the book is "Translated from the Hungarian by Vernon Duckworth Barker." I thought for a moment I had fallen in love with an English translation of a French translation of a Hungarian text. Not that I think that's impossible, it would just be a little surprising.)

A few reviews of NYRB's edition have turned up:
--Will Heinrich's piece "Turning Kafka on His Head" in the New York Observer.
--A blurb in Wired. (Every time I come across this one, I think, "Oh my God, Mena Suvari is going to be in a movie version of A Journey Round My Skull....with the Re-Animator guy directing! I guess this is known as wish fulfillment.)
--Agony Column blog review.

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Corvina paperback edition

October 17, 2008: Returning to my roots, here is Paul Di Filippo on A Journey Round My Skull:

If one could extract the subplot from Hannah and Her Sisters involving Woody Allen's hypochondriacal brush with mortality via a possible brain tumor, then hand those pages to the team of Franz Kafka, Robert Benchley, and Isaac Bashevis Singer for a rewrite, one might possibly get back A Journey Round My Skull: a surreal, absurdist, yet philosophically and emotionally deep and fancifully antic meditation upon death and life.

Read the full review.

August 22, 2007: I'm really going to work on a full listing of English-language books from Corvina Press. Get in touch if you can help. Here's their great logo. [9/13/2011 update: an abandoned project]