Kepler's 2020 Project in the News:
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Not since reading Disgrace, a Booker Prize winning novel by J.M. Coetzee, have I encountered such an unadorned, unsentimental, believable portrayal of dogs. Niki:The Story of a Dog, by Tibor Déry tells a story about love, trust and fear amidst harsh Stalinist times in postwar Hungary. But Niki is foremost a story of love. A young, female fox-terrier, with a white coat and nut brown ears, adopts Janos Ancsa and his wife. The middle-aged Ancsas are childless, "their only son had been killed at Voronesh." They live in the "outer suburbs at Csobanka," and Janos Ancsa, an engineer, commutes every day to Budapest. The year is 1948. Janos doesn’t succumb to the charms of the terrier immediately. There is a wonderful passage in the book in which he contemplates in an interior monologue that "There is no dictatorship more ferocious and jealous than that of love." After Janos gets promoted to the director of the Mining Equipment and Tools plant, all three move to a small flat in Budapest. The book follows Niki‘s sentimental and intellectual evolution as she adopts to city life and Janos is unexpectedly relieved from his post and then appointed to a machine-making factory in Ujpest, and after that a new job in a soap works, then to an contractor’s organization, and then arrested, and "for a whole year there was no news of him whatsoever." What follows is the story of Mrs. Ancsa’s and Niki’s life together after Janos’ disappearance. Those pages are some of the most poignant about our relationship with animals and how a small bitch terrier bestows a state of grace on her owners. --Aggie Z. |
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