IN ENGLISH

Doll Count (excerpt from the novel)
translated by: Paul Olchváry

 “Doll Count is a riveting portrayal of a psychologically,  verbally, physically, and sexually abused little girl, the first  work in Hungary to break this taboo.” –  click to read

About the Author

Veronika Czapáry (1975–)is the author of two novels published in her native Hungary, Mom is Laughing (Anya kaczag: Jelenkor, 2012) and Doll Count (Megszámolt babák: Scolar, 2013). Her short stories and poems have been published since 2004 in Hungary’s top journals-including Lettre Internationale, Kalligram, ÉS, 2000, Alföld, and Helikon-and she regularly publishes book, theater, and film reviews. Czapáry is also a noted author of psychoanalytic feminist literary criticism and essays on the unpublished novels of women writers of the past. Her essay “I Am a Woman in Hungary” appeared in A Megaphone, an anthology published in the United States (Chain Links, 2011). Czapáry, who is also active as an organizer of literary events, was born in 1975 in Győr and earned degrees in Hungarian language and literature from the University of Pécs. In addition to Hungarian, she speaks English and German.

Doll Count

Veronika Czapáry
Veronika Czapáry’s 50,000-word novel Doll Count is a riveting portrayal of a psychologically, verbally, physically, and sexually abused little girl-a book whose publication in Hungary (Megszámolt babák; Scolar Kiadó, Budapest, 2013) was a literary sensation, the first work in that country to break this taboo. The shocking story its twenty-three chapters tells is, however, more than a diagnostic report: its lyrical prose unfolds in the unyielding ballad-like rhythm, making Doll Count a song of endurance, of one young woman’s insistence on the right to go on living.

Doll Counttakes on a subject rarely treated so unabashedly by works of literary fiction: the rape of children by family members, more succinctly known as incest. It sweeps the reader into the emotionally traumatized world of the victim from her own perspective-even as a young child.

Through the first-person of an abused little girl called Nicolette, we glean information about the reactions of those around her, her futile attempts to resist, and how the violence she undergoes weaves its way into the fabric of her life, taking shape as her natural medium-a medium in which she somehow learns to live from day to day. Even as she goes to school and seeks to build friendships, though, her deep wounds continually foil her attempts to climb her way into a normal life.

Early on we learn that Nicolette’s parents regularly lock her away. We then learn of the abuse-the humiliation, the emotional blackmail-she suffers at their hands, and we learn that the father rapes her daily as the mother looks the other way and the grandparents act as if everything was in order.

Nicolette’s only companions amid her utter vulnerability are her dolls.

Again and again Nicolette escapes to her personalized dolls from her private hell; her repeated efforts to keep count of them comprise the story’s recurring motif. Her siblings regularly hide or maim the dolls to hurt her. The dolls are used and abused in other respects, too, becoming the objects of bargaining and blackmailing by Nicolette’s own parents.

Nicolette’s age seems to hardly matters after a while, since the same sort of violence keeps recurring. There is no beginning, no end, no way out.

It’s as if time is standing still or, rather, as if several different sorts of time existed simultaneously. Nicolette’s passing years come together in a blur, time whirling about virtually in one place from the time she is three years old to the close of her teenage years. Gradually the information comes, building slowly, subtly to the shocking realization that this is a maelstrom from which there is no escape.

Praise from
Hungary’s media and popular websites
for Doll Count

 

“Czapáry is a magnificent stylist. She hits upon a tone, and, like a musician with perfect pitch, maintains it throughout. . . . This tone is that of a little girl. Golding’s [characters in] . . . Lord of the Flies are little whippersnappers compared to this. We take delight in the literature, in Czapáry’s narrative talent-and we are revolted by the life circumstances that allow events like these to occur. This little girl . . . is constantly counting her dolls. The dolls are indeed alive to her, with readily notable names, and her nightmarish parents also accept this fiction, perceiving as they do that only in this manner does their used and abused and loathed child experience a sort of freedom. And, indeed, they regularly exterminate her dolls, who-yes, who, and not which-slowly dwindle away.”

—-Népszabadság, Hungary’s leading daily newspaper

“Czapáry successfully depicts virtually everything about the duality of attraction and repulsion, love and hate.”

—-litera.hu

“If it were up to me, I’d make this book obligatory reading for everyone twenty-one and over, for although it is fiction, its every page brings us face to face with life’s hushed-up horrors.”

—-kultography.hu

“It’s easier to resign oneself to the absence of morals than to the willful undertaking of immorality. We cannot cry this book out of ourselves. . . . It eats its way into the reader’s soul, and nothing will ever seem the same.”
—-olvasoterem.com

“The idea that this novel’s subject matter is sensational might occur in the minds of some (and there will obviously be some such persons) who don’t have a clue as to how emotional traumas build within an individual and as to the consequences. . . . Czapáry sweeps us into the world of the two-, four-, and eight-year-old Nicolette.”

—-olvassbele.com

“Doll Count is a precise and unrelenting work that dismantles the hope of any sort of freedom; for over time, in the absence of any escape route, of any help, its protagonist, a girl who has suffered abuse all her life, gets used to and even comes to ‘love’ the abuse and the abuser alike. We witness the clinically precise unraveling of a sort of Stockholm syndrome, and to too its culmination, the closing of the circle.”
—-origo.hu

“Some books cause pain. Physical and mental alike. And not by hitting us in the face. Nor by taking something away from us. But on account of their subject. For example, a physically, psychologically, and sexually abused little girl. In the first person singular. In a child’s voice, and yet a serious voice.”

—-ekultura.hu

Mom Is Laughing

Veronika Czapáry

Budapest at night: a trap-laden city. Budapest by day: a trap-laden city. A young girl seeking her place among the traps. Victoria, the narrator-protagonist of Veronika Czapáry’s 70,000-word novel Mom Is Laughing(Anya kacag, Jelenkor Kiadó: Pécs, Hungary, 2012), makes her way in fits and starts about the seamy scenes of one of Europe’s most storied capital cities, seeking escape by night amid the mesmerizing effects of alcohol, drugs, and sex, only to be followed by sober awakenings by day.

A cinematic, gyrating force of a novel that unfolds mostly in the vortex of nighttime Budapest, Mom Is Laughing is told in the form of a single young woman’s diary-the result being a shocking and provocative parody of the chick lit phenomenon.

Victoria, an extreme, nonconformist personality unable to find her place in society, drives herself to the edge again and again in a frantic effort to realize her goal-that of achieving the idyllic happiness she yearns for.
With plainspoken honesty, Victoria’s diary entries recount the pleasures and the pains of a woman’s sexuality, the disillusionment that hits hard every time she tries but fails to find a companion; and, as part and parcel of all this, her drifting in and out of both art cafés and hole-in-the-wall dive bars.

Led by her hunger for love, Victoria flees from the bed of one man to that of another. Along the way she describes her sexual experiences and the unexpected situations she plunges into on account of her capricious lifestyle. Ever on the prowl to fill her brooding sense of emptiness, her life philosophy might be summed up thus: “Just let something happen already!”
Perfection-obsessed Victoria reacts hysterically to failures. With the help of a psychologist she tries uncovering the childhood traumas behind the terrible aspects of adulthood. These and other memories of the past emerge again and again, woven lyrically into the diary entries.

The traumas-a mother who died young and nightmarish memories of a sexually abusive father, as well as regular abuse and humiliation from her stepmother, her siblings, and from her peers-keep bubbling to the surface while likewise manifesting themselves in the regressive behavior Victoria displays as an adult.

Mom Is Laughing is a psychological novel in which it is neither the degree of suffering nor the number of blows that really matters, but rather the fact that the heroine has lived through all this and endured it with extraordinary vigor. A powerful new take on women’s fiction, it is also a merciless parody of the chick lit phenomenon.

Praised in its native Hungary as the first work of literary fiction that dared to broach the subject of women’s sexuality in such starkly honest terms Mom Is Laughing reveals those experiences in a woman’s life that she would otherwise keep very much to herself. It will be savored by all readers who relentlessly drag their never-ending pasts about them in a dizzyingly modern urban world.

Praise from
Hungary’s media and popular blogs
for Mom Is Laughing

“In a maelstrom of gyrating episodes, the protagonist of this novel falls in love, suffers, falls into despair, gets drunk, gets drugged up, flees into wild and unrestrained sexual acts, and, finally, is disillusioned and beset by guilt, at which point it all begins anew. And, we suspect, all this will not end with the novel’s end; after so many distressing moments in her life we cannot let her go. No, we cannot help worry about her, sensing as we do that, at best, death will end her continual torment. . . . With poetic precision [Czapáry] describes the indescribable.”
—-Népszabadság, Hungary’s leading daily newspaper

“If we take Mother Theresa, Carrie Bradshaw, and Freud’s Dora, throw them into an imaginary blender, and press the start button, in all probability we will get Viktoria, the protagonist of Veronika Czapáry’s first novel.”

—-origo.hu

“Mom Is Laughing  . . . shares much in common not only with Bridget Jones’s Diary but . . . also with [Sue Townsend’s series featuring fictional protagonist] Adrian Mole. But by the end, the merry-go-round comes slowly to a halt, and the prospect of a way out comes into view: ‘There is a future, I do still have a goal before me.’”
—-Magyar Narancs, Hungary’s foremost liberal weekly magazine

“Simply put, we can call this young writer revolutionary for having set as her book’s primary goal to show us our era’s new, all-determining paradigm for relationships, one in which women are no longer passive players but shape their own fates, their own sexual lives.”

—-irodalmicentrifuga.hu

“The author remarked in an interview that her goal in this novel was to ‘yank the veil off the self-delusion represented by chic-lit novels and Hollywood films, the delusion that a relationship can (in and of itself) bring happiness without someone continuing to carry the weight of her past’. . . . Such plain-spoken words are rare from a woman writer.”

—-csaladhalo.hu

“Has the heroine managed to get beyond her continual emotional crises? Can she find a way out of mourning, and will she reconcile with her mother, who . . . harasses her daughter with her ambivalent laughter even from beyond the grave? . . . Will she find stability in an intimate relationship, or, as she yearns to do so even more, within herself?”

—-kulter.hu