Best 1992 Adventures (3)

By: Joshua Glenn
June 7, 2020

One in a series of 10 posts identifying Josh Glenn’s favorite 1992 adventure novels.

Tibor Fischer’s Under the Frog.

One of my favorite novels — though admittedly not an adventure, at least not all the time. Gyuri Fischer, a young Hungarian, has lived under Russian occupation for the past eight years… which is to say, since 1948. In 1956, which the reader knows is the year of the student-led Hungarian Uprising (the first major threat to Soviet control), though our protagonist does not, we follow Gyuri’s hijinks as a basketball player on a traveling team. He and his friend, Pataki, and the other team members spend their time in search of food, alcohol, and girls; they travel to games in the nude, just because they can. (The author’s parents, both basketball players, fled Hungary for England in 1956.) Pataki, a rebellious troublemaker, gets himself arrested by the secret police — a brutal appendage of the Soviet Union’s secret police forces. Otherwise, this is a black comedy about life under tyranny; the Hungarians are tough, unsentimental, and unpersuaded by government rhetoric about the “gains of socialism.” Fischer’s writing is brilliant, inventive, supremely amusing. When the Uprising, which lasted from October 23 until November 10, gets underway, suddenly we’re in a guerilla war adventure. The tonality is saga-like — violence happens, but life goes on. This sort of thing is interrupted, however, by Gyuri’s love affair — a marvelous adventure of its own, while it lasts.

Fun facts: Fischer’s debut effort was rejected 58 times before Polygon, a small independent publisher, took it on. It was the first debut novel to be shortlisted for the Booker Prize; Fischer was named to Granta’s Best Of Young British novelists list in the same year. The title is taken from a Hungarian expression — “under a frog’s arse, down a coalmine” — which describes a situation when things can’t get any worse.

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Best 1992 Adventures (3)

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