THE AMBER COMPLEX by Attila Veres

“The Outskirts Pub was opened in the early ’90s by a man named Béla Ózdi and his life partner, Magdolna.”

Again a Béla scenario triggers what happens …and ends it, too. The enigma of the eventernal GESTALT resolved as a mountain of all of us past and present, famous and unknown, or just two – you and you as me and me. “…ejected the Chopin CD and by mutual consensus they put on a Rage Against the Machine…”
The story in a sort of post-Soviet no man’s land between Hungary and Ukraine, and featuring this downbeat pub as a sort of church as the art of literature, I guess, and Gábor Szeiber’s head-bending cube of a family home made of crosses on the walls and perhaps cracked tiles, a single vision of a single such tile starting this work’s rite of passage through colour-coded complexes drunk as part of his decision to make a career move to become an alcoholic. I shall leave you to discover these various visions that carry themes and even characters from the rest of the book, such as Eszter, and also featuring his mother and a spiritual cannibalism, and images that are more art installations as objective-correlatives than directly meaningful things, such as a packet of cigarettes, blue writing on white. It is all terribly compulsive reading as well as convulsive in the maze of corridors that constitute Zanó’s wine cellar. Some of you won’t be able to reach the end of this ritual passage. But as Gábor did, I did too, to the very last and eponymous complex in this story, the gestalt of one’s life and the people one’s met in this story of ‘parallel dimensions’. Just as I try to real-time to create a gestalt from my church that is literature. Its ‘blue sky’ thinking. Its event horizon of eternity. 

And here are my previous such dimensions that are, arguably, in mutual synergy with this work and this whole book: 

HERE — a prose poem posted here a few months ago.
HERE…an old post showing a static amber of a traffic light. My own perpetual autumn, I hope.
And a thread on ‘eventernal’: HERE
Not so much a life “carved out in a state of drunkenness” as this Veresian work has deemed the maze of a wine cellar to be, and I try moderately to drink wine as part of my routine in old age, but also hopefully this whole book seen “through the eyes of an aeons-old creature.”

“…a peaceful thing to be part of this mountain. It doesn’t matter whether you perceive your life as a failure or success.”

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My other AV reviews: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/10/06/the-stories-of-attila-veres/