The Carcass Remover

They had heard about five dead foxes, lying in the road by the Hungarian-Serbian border. But when the men from the disposal unit arrive, there are dozens of carcasses, dogs and cats, too – shot, it seems, by border guards to pass the time. The war in the Balkans is long over, and yet incidents like these haul the narrator back into his past.

Sitting in the garden of a Berlin clinic where he is stuck until his terrible digestion issues are treated, he is overcome by the music of a Kusturica film and he starts to sob: »perhaps because it brought it all back to the surface, all he tried to run away from, those desolate years of hollowing-out, years that seemed without end, nor desirous of an end, and on they endured.«

Who is this narrator, who stumbles back and forth between the scenes of his life in a torrent of speech that threatens to sweep him away; part of a carcass-collecting unit that had once completed a rather different task? Is he a victim, a perpetrator? A survivor who is seeking a cure through speaking?

The war in Yugoslavia and its afterlife have never lessened their hold on Zoltán Danyi – for almost two decades he failed in his attempt to comprehend the monstrous reality that almost entirely devoured him. One day, the sound was there – a sound that makes for compelling reading. The writing shimmers like the surface of a contaminated body of water. Layer by layer it is laid bare. A book constructed like a complex musical composition whose beauty contains both distance and an intimate touch.

»Zoltán Danyi’s irate first novel The Carcass Remover is a literary event that has reached far beyond the borders of Hungary. ... Beneath every surface lies a sinister depth, and it is into these that Danyi mercilessly shines his light. A gaze one has to endure. He is a first-class novelist; above all, however, he offers us an urgent challenge in the face of Europe’s breakdown.« Ilma Rakusa, Neue Zürcher Zeitung

»The Carcass Remover is a perfect book of paradoxical beauty that deals with the ugly within us.« Süddeutsche Zeitung

»The great success of The Carcass Remover is not entirely down to its aesthetic quality, but also its shocking timeliness, the permanent contemporary nature of history, its continual return, the death of culture, of humanity, of the myth of Europe. The fact that here and now we are also living in wartime.« Orsolya Bencsik, Müut

»The beauty of the language with which a manic narrator wrestles his demons, chapter after chapter, is astonishing.« Literatur Spiegel

»Zoltán Danyi has written a great novel.« Frankfurter Rundschau

»This novel, awarded the esteemed Miklos-Meszöly Prize in Hungary, tells a tale of brutal violence and the drastic nature of bodily dysfunction, as well as the combination of sexuality and faecal matter, in a highly refined way.« Deutschlandfunk Kultur

»Literature does not lend itself to the process of working through traumatic experiences, of this much Zoltán Danyi is convinced. But it does lend itself very well indeed to its powerful description and reproduction. The Carcass Remover is the ultimate proof.« ORF Ö1 Ex libris