Barcode

Barcode, Krisztina Toth’s first substantial work in prose after four volumes of remarkable verse, consists of fifteen beautifully written and highly sensual short stories. Each story, apart from one, is told with poetic intensity and intimacy from a young, unnamed female narrator’s point of view. Whether about childhood acquaintances, school camps and trips, or love and deceit in love, they are all are set against the backdrop of Hungary’s socialist era in its declining years. What sets this book apart, however, is another level in the work as a whole: the stories are carefully strung, like jewels in a necklace, along metaphorical ‘lines’, as in the title of the collection and the subtitle of the pieces, which nearly all include the word for ‘line, bar’. The losses, disappointments, and tragedies great and small recounted here offer nuanced ‘mirrorings’ of the female soul and linger long in the memory.