Violence, Beyond, Sanity: A Review of The Devil is a Black Dog, by P K Vijayan

Title of Book: The Devil is a Black Dog: Stories of War and Revolution from the Middle East and

Beyond, by Sndor Jszbernyi (trans. M Henderson Ellis)

Publisher: Speaking Tiger, New Delhi

Genre: Fiction

Extent: 194 pp

Price: Rs 299

The collection of short stories under review by the Hungarian photojournalist and writer, Sndor

Jszbernyi, has the catchy title, The Devil is a Black Dog: Stories of War and Revolution from

the Middle East and Beyond. There are nineteen stories in all in this collection, of varying length,

ranging from three or four pages to the title story, 'The Devil is a Black Dog', which is about twenty

pages long. Four of these 'Professional Killers', 'How We Didn't Win', 'Homecoming' and 'The

Desert is Cold in the Morning' are set in Europe, presumably in the writer's native Hungary. The

rest are set in the Middle East and North Africa as the subtitle states, in the 'Middle East and

Beyond'. The 'Beyond' therefore refers to Hungary on the one hand, and North Africa on the other

(with one rather telling exception, which moves between Europe and Africa 'The Field' which I

will comment on shortly). I will engage briefly with the four European-setting stories first, before

discussing the others.

'Professional Killers' is a powerful tale of the traumatic realization of violent death, told from the

point of view of a child. 'How We Didn't Win' is about a retaliation in a gang-war, that goes wrong

(the wrong person is targeted and severely brutalized by the narrator and his friend a fact they

discover later). In 'Homecoming' the narrator goes hunting with his father and his father's friend,

to celebrate his return to Hungary from North Africa. As they hunt and kill a deer, the narrator

recalls the Muslim woman he has loved and left behind, indifferent to her pleas for help to escape

from Islamic extremists in Sudan. 'The Desert is Cold in the Morning' is one of the more moving,

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even poignant pieces in the collection, recounting as it does the narrator's return to his family

home on his father's death, and his struggle to deal with the tension between his own emotional

emptiness and the enormous emotional demand of the situation. 'Professional Killers' and 'How

We Didn't Win' are totally immersed in the European context, and do not bear any traces of the

world beyond. The other two stories in contrast are haunted by those other worlds that the

writer has inhabited, and that appear now to shape and form his responses to and relations with

his home world. Rania, the woman abandoned in Khartoum by the narrator of 'Homecoming', and

seeking to escape from there, thus mirrors the narrator's own discomfort in his native land, and

his sense that he needs to escape it and return to those other places.

Apart from their common setting, the running theme linking these stories is violence sometimes

brutally explicit, sometimes oblique and understated, but ubiquitous as indeed, it is in all the

stories in this collection. In the other stories, set in Africa and the Middle East, much of this

violence is either explicitly stated to be of a religious kind specifically, of the Islamic extremist

kind; or takes place in an environment steeped in Islamic fundamentalism, if not extremism. Thus,

stories like 'How Ahmed Salem Abandoned God', 'Twins' and 'The Majestic Clouds' belong to the

first kind, while stories like 'The Blake Precept', 'Taking Trinidad', 'The First' and the title story,

'The Devil is a Black Dog' - indeed, the majority of them - belong in the second. The focus on

violence is only to be expected of course, since they are supposed to be stories of war and

revolution: however, there is not much revolution, and the war is more civil war than

conventional war between nation-states (implicitly raising the question, Is one persons revolution

anothers civil war - and vice versa?). Which is why these stories are vignettes that map the

effects of such violence in and on civilian populaces.

This, however, also means that the writer is engaging with the lives and tales of ordinary people

caught in incredibly extraordinary situations, effected by the violence of their situations. Stories

like End of the World, Taking Trinidad and 'The Desert is Cold in the Morning' vividly paint the

terrible price paid by the person covering the violence, in terms of the loss of humanity,

graphically capturing the deadening of the soul required to continue reporting on these situations.

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Indeed, the overall tone of the collection is bleak, the style stark and minimalist, reminiscent of

Hemingway, whom in fact the writer cites in the epigraph to 'The Desert is Cold in the Morning'.

But Jszbernyi is also more brutally honest, relentlessly exposing the selfishness, indifference

and callousness that war and violence breed, not sparing even the narrators themselves of these

stories. The extreme nature of the situations, of the violence in them, give the stories an air of

unreality, at times even evocative of elements of the supernatural - as in the title story, or in The

Blake Precept. But there is also a savage bitterness and irony that haunts these reports from the

edge of sanity, best seen in The Field, which presents the inhuman underside of humanitarian

agencies - but also makes us ask, Could this be any other way in the face of such violence? -

which is where the bitterness comes in.

Jszbernyis stories are themselves not untainted by the hypocrisies of the humanitarian

agencies. Even as he strives to be unflinchingly honest, the beyond in the title of the book raises

questions - about the politics of location, of subject-position, the persistence of Eurocentrism, the

nature of belonging, the failure to belong, etc - that suggest that through these stories of violence

in the beyond, the writer is perhaps trying to suggest a certain inevitability, a fatal and inexorable

quality to the violence that renders it the same everywhere, and therefore allows him to absolve

himself of any responsibility for it. But equally, we are persistently aware that Jszbernyi is too

honest not to be himself aware of these paradoxes - and that the searing anguish in some of the

stories may perhaps have their source in this awareness.

That said, this collection is a must read - not just for aficionados of war fiction, or readers

interested in the Middle East, but for anyone interested in understanding the borders and

boundaries of sanity in the face of extreme violence. A note of caution though: these stories have

a way of sticking in the mind, and can result in a profound sense of sorrow.