El tiempo parece haberse detenido en Svetlaia, una pobre aldea de Siberia. La vida allí transcurre a la sombra de los campos del Gulag, dominada por el aislamiento, el vodka y la taiga. Mitia, el narrador, reconstruye veinte años después y desde el exilio, la infancia y adolescencia que compartió con sus amigos, Samurai y Utkin. El descubrimiento del amor y sus ritos iniciáticos —descritos por Makine con una cruda sensibilidad— junto a la fascinación por Occidente, forjarán la educación sentimental de los tres jóvenes. Las imágenes del inaccesible mundo occidental les llegarán con el legendario tren Transiberiano. A su paso fugaz, los tres adolescentes fantasean sobre las vidas que apenas adivinan tras las ventanillas iluminadas de los vagones. Encontrarán otra vía de escape en el cine Octubre Rojo, escenario de la revelación de una realidad diferente y redentora: en las películas que protagonizó Jean-Paul Belmondo, descubrirán al héroe aventurero en el que depositarán sus obsesiones y sueños juveniles. A orillas del amor es una poética reflexión sobre las dificultades de hacerse adulto.

"– Volna egy ritka, szépen fejlett daganatom tanár úr részére, ha érdekli… gyűjtőknek való példány. Olcsón megszámítanám."
Régóta készültem, hogy elolvasom, aztán mindig csak sokadik maradt a listán. Felnőtt olvasmányaim egyik legelgondolkodtatóbbja...
Egy zseni balszerencséjének eredménye: az olvasóknak zseniális olvasmány. A kint és a bent témája - az anyag és az elme, a lélek harca, leírása. Önismeret és a személyiség feltárása a halál árnyékában. Hitetetlen bátorság kellett hozzá, hogy megírja és kiadja - és egyúttal ez volt az egyetlen módszere a túlélésre. A mindent felülmúló humor, a jókedv, az önmagunk kigúnyolása, a lelkierő, amibe kapaszkodhatunk - akár a legszürkébb hétköznapon vagy a legnagyobb életküzdelmek viharában...
"Az emberek rosszul mérik az időt – egyetlen mérték van, az átélés sebessége (…)"
És nem mindegy, hogy hány átélés, hányféle élmény fér bele - a milyenségén talán még mi is alakíthatunk... ( )

Some of the last melancholy pages of Simon Winder’s Danubia read as a lament for the dissolution of Hungarian intellectual life in the conflagration that consumed the Habsburg Dynasty, and before I read Karinthy’s story I imagined it in that milieu. Taken on its own terms, though, A Journey Around My Skull is a report of one man's disorientation and resignation and resilience, with moments of poetic self-awareness and wry humor and poignant insight and absurd silliness.

In 1930s Hungary, all eras and ages exist at the same time. After alerting his friends to his strange symptoms, Karinthy imagines them in the corner of a café, like a scrum of gyulas, the ancient Magyar counselors who met before a decisive battle to consult auguries and omens and advise the chieftain on the prudent course of action. A beggar with a hurdy gurdy passes by the window; a mechanic at the armaments factory devises a new surgical blade mounted on a swivel. Another friend reminds Karinthy that 20 years before he had written a play about an engineer who invents an aeroplane to fly without a pilot. Before the test flight, as he is wrestling with his fear, he is visited by his alter ego, a doctor from the north who proposes to remove by a delicate operation the part of the brain responsible for the fear of death, located at the back of the skull in the cerebellum. Laid up in his sick room later, Karinthy comforts himself by recalling how Silvio Pellico, jailed for 10 years by the Holy Roman Emperor Francis II, stoically resigned himself to his fate. After losing his sight, he decides that he can endure a life of blindness, since he is old enough to have drawn from the world of light all he needs to sustain himself in darkness. Besides, he could finally work in peace without being disturbed.

A short interlude in the middle of the book relates a series of dreams Karinthy has while waiting for treatment: high up in a swaying skyscraper in New York City (a place he has never been) he sits across the table from someone he knows is Al Capone, who Karinthy suspects of having stolen it and hidden it in a wooden box—but it is unclear whether the two of them are pretending to ignore a tumor or the Lindbergh baby; a banquet of tasteless, chewy meat is held in his honor in Ankara; in the Alhambra, hunched over, he studies an anatomical atlas with a glass-like illustration of the human circulatory system that seems to throb and wobble the table.

The cover of the NYRB edition of A Journey Around My Skull by Alice Attie shows a moon-scape head sutured with wire and clamped with threaded knobs to a hatch-marked contraption suggestive of railroad tracks. The cranial-machine vibe carries through the passage describing Karinthy’s surgery at the hands of a renowned surgeon in Stockholm (the whir of electric trephine, ‘the silent rush of liquid over a glass slab,’ ‘the sound of pumping and draining’) like a steampunk version of Ted Chiang’s “Exhalation,” or a scene from Terry Gilliam's "Brazil." ( )

É estranho ler as memórias de um homem contando como um tumor cerebral afetou sua vida – especialmente quando sabemos que esse tumor acabou por matá-lo. Mais estranho é que isso é não só interessante, mas divertido, graças à escrita de Karinthy. ( )

In 1936, Frigyes Karinthy, a famous Hungarian writer and journalist, was diagnosed with a brain tumor. Though the tumor was benign, it affected Karinthy’s vision and mental state and would lead to blindness if untreated. Karinthy was able to schedule an appointment with one of the foremost experts of the day, Dr. Olivecrona, and traveled to Sweden for the surgery. He underwent the procedure with no anaesthetic. It was successful and Karinthy retained his vision, contrary to expectation. A Journey Round My Skull is the story of his experiences. While sometimes Karinthy dwells on random matters and can be a bit distant, the book is engaging and well-written with all sorts of interesting fantastical flourishes.

Karinthy starts off by describing the first moment he knew something was off – when he heard a roaring train while seated at a Budapest café. There was no train but Karinthy regularly began to hear the hallucination. Fits of dizziness and vomiting followed with one instance where the world was suddenly off. Several coincidental occurrences – a film he saw about brain surgery, a discussion of tumors with his wife, a psychiatrist – led the narrator to suggest a diagnosis to his doctor. Previous diagnoses had been mild but the symptoms continued. As discussions went on about his condition, Karinthy went to a sanatorium and was finally told he had to have surgery immediately. He describes impressions of Sweden and the doctors which leads up to several chapters of his experiences during the surgery. He also describes his recovery.

Karinthy spends time on some things that I felt weren’t too important – lots of travel time for example – and occasionally doesn’t give his thoughts on motivations (why the delay in telling his family – certainly there would be reasons, but he doesn’t give them). The writing is appealing and surprisingly light. Karinthy has imaginative descriptions of his symptoms – the hallucinations, the moment when it seems like everything is wrong. He includes comic moments, like the scene where he describes his visitors to the sanatorium or a council meeting of doctors. There are also some unexpected flights of fancy, like when Karinthy pictures the life of a sanatorium inmate, relates confusing dreams, describes a possible meeting with death, and, when he is being operated on, has a vision of floating out of his body and looking down on the surgery. One chapter also describes how nonfiction can be stranger than fiction and the process that the author used to reassemble his memoirs. ( )