Scanning things—QR codes, concert tickets, credit cards, proof of vaccination (for a hot minute)—has become a routine means of gaining access or information. The OG scannable, the barcode, is still around, inconspicuous except for when you can’t quickly locate one in the self-checkout line. Capitalist concerns inspired the barcode, its invention sparked by a shop owner in the late 1940s who wanted to increase profits by reducing checkout delays and inventory procedures. The design and technology took decades—the first product scanned was a pack of Wrigley’s gum at a Troy, Ohio, grocer’s on June 26, 1974—but adoption by US manufacturers and retailers was swift. Most everything sold or made in Reagan’s America bore the rectangular identifier.

For the narrator of “Tepid Milk,” one of the standout stories in Hungarian writer Krisztina Tóth’s thoughtful new collection Barcode, the “little black lines” were “the touchstone of things that came from the West,” a tantalizing window on the inaccessible. The barcode “imparted a magical allure even to stuff that was otherwise quite ordinary, transforming them into messages from a world beyond our reach, a world of objects in shiny boxes and wrapping paper and people swathed in voluptuous fabrics.” Originally published in 2006 and now translated into English by Peter Sherwood for Jantar Publishing, Barcode is animated by ideas of division, categorization, restriction, and isolation—none as emblematic as the lines that symbolize the imagined differences between the lived reality behind the Iron Curtain and the perception of prosperity in the West.

Not every story in Barcode concerns geographical division. In Hungarian, the book is titled Vonalkód, where vonal means line, and each of the fifteen stories bears a parenthetical subtitle—“Bikini Line,” “Blood Line,” “Transport Line Tickets,” and so on. Tóth was born in 1967, and there is a lived-in quality to many of the scenes and emotions in Barcode that is often found in work by Central and Eastern European authors writing about growing up under communism. The stories are told from the perspective of an unnamed Hungarian woman at different stages in her life, from infancy in the 1970s through motherhood in the 1990s. I read them as versions of the same person, but it is unclear how tied together the stories actually are. Names recur, but the characters have often changed significantly, possibly due to the simple passage of time, as with a character named Rudi, who in one story is a teenaged heartthrob who skates like a dream, and in another is a homeless adult who uses a wheelchair.

While Barcode was Tóth’s fiction debut, she was already a lauded poet when it was published. It is her second collection to appear in English, after Owen Good’s translation of Pixel, which was published by Seagull in 2019. Stylistically, Tóth’s prose retains plenty of lyrical flourishes, with an astute eye for imagery aided by Sherwood’s attentive translations. She is particularly fond of colors, whether “faux-silk curtains of spinach-green” or “deep scars the color of mother-of-pearl.” Most memorable, perhaps, is the appraisal by the adolescent narrator in “What’s This Mark Here?” of the soles of grown-ups’ feet: “Their heels are like cheese rind. I don’t want to be with the yellow-heels.” Through the poetic use of caesura, Tóth often sets off a single sentence or phrase as its own paragraph, like in “Cold Floor,” where the almost matter-of-fact suffering inherent to the line “How hard it is to cut oneself free of desire” is intensified by its solitude. Or again in “What’s This Mark Here?”, where the sibilant thought “Sand in my sneakers, sand in my wristwatch; time stands still” separates the teenage narrator being fondled at camp from her adult self on a beach.

Sherwood, who was born in Hungary and moved with his family to the UK after the 1956 revolution, displays an ear for both the felicities of the language, as in “Jagged shadows shimmered in the sweltering heat,” and the perfect metaphor, as when he describes a distant forest as “here-be-dragons country.” He taught university in London for more than thirty years, and his Barcode is a very British-English translation. This is mostly inconsequential, but repeat usage of Britishisms like “elevenses” and “Indian file” made some moments distractingly un-Hungarian, as did the transliteration of a pet dog’s name as Johnnyboy.

Stories about the line between life and death bookend the collection. The opener, “Vacant People,” takes place sometime after 1989. A thirty-five-year-old mother recalls a death fifteen years earlier, when she was “an ignorant, know-it-all semi-adult.” The deceased, an eighty-year-old surrogate grandfather, had asked her for a kiss at their last meeting and she became uncomfortable. “His speech was soft and crumbly, as if the words had lost their definition.” Rather than question his meaning or give him a peck on the forehead, she ignored him. On reflection, she doesn’t feel she has matured, “merely grown older” and lost confidence.

The middle-aged narrator in the concluding “Miserere” is also processing the death of an older man, a family friend whom she had known her whole life. She recalls a vacation when she was a child during which the man called her scrawny. She has been “unable to forgive” him in the intervening years and viewed her visit to his death bed as mere “rapprochement.” Like the woman in “Vacant People,” she feels maladjusted, separated from the type of person she imagines that adults ought to be. “I was incapable of forgetting, of reassessing, or even of merely understanding, all the wounds inflicted on me.”

Death looms over other stories, with the young woman in “What’s This Mark Here?” declaring, “I hated that there was such a thing as a body and that there was death, and that it was through the body that death spoke.” All these incarnations of the narrator feel alienated, even fatalistic, perhaps a consequence of living in a country whose grasp at freedom in 1956 was so violently put down by Soviet troops. That milestone is the subject of the excellent entry “The Fence.” After a routine checkup, the narrator’s mother investigates the source of her husband’s scars, which he has always maintained resulted from a car accident. His old doctor parries the inquiry, but reveals to readers what really happened, because “stories never end, they only break off and lie low, like latent diseases, and then resurface to continue to spread, resulting in stabs of pain elsewhere, only for that pain to be passed down from generation to generation.”

The older generation in “Insulated Floor” exhibits a similar “latent” fear when a father overhears his son boast to the teenage narrator that he once gave a fake address to the transit police. The father’s buried terror creeps forth out of a lengthy, scene-setting sentence that is perhaps the most beautiful in the collection, showcasing Tóth’s poetic sensibilities and Sherwood’s skills. In “The Pencil Case,” a primary school girl about to be falsely accused has the trepidation of the doctor from “The Fence,” echoing his observations by remarking that “there are stories and there is also fate, and a particular fate sometimes has no connection at all with the stories themselves, that fate has its own stories and its own time.”

Story and fate collide most grandiosely in “Outline Map,” where the narrator, a university student in 1989, retreats into memories of her childhood after the death of János Kádár, former general secretary of the communist party who led Hungary from 1956 through 1988. Despite the country’s impending “freedom,” the young woman is confused, saddened, and “sorry that the landscape of our childhood would soon disappear […] that in the sequence of events some kind of curious, unbridgeable gap was being created.” That “landscape” is subsumed once she learns that her boyfriend has been cheating on her, but is gloriously captured in a different story, “Black Snowman,” which depicts the uniformity of life in the agglomerations of ten-story apartment blocks that are ubiquitous on the outskirts of so many former Eastern-bloc cities.

Another persistent theme in Barcode is the fine line between love and solitude. The cause can be distance, as in “Take Five,” where a woman living in Paris realizes that her boyfriend back in Hungary is “no longer a real being, just a sender of letters with news not from real life but rather as evidence of some sophisticated fiction.” Or it can be something that happens off the page, “a particular fate with no connection at all” to the story, as in the heart-wrenching “Cold Floor,” where a poet invited to a literary conference in Tokyo spends her trip on the “unfinished business” of processing the end of a relationship.

These stories set in Japan and France also illustrate the narrator’s complicated relationship with the idealized world of the barcode. En route to Japan, she reads that the “baseline of services everywhere is so high” that even the most modest will seem “impeccable” to a Hungarian, yet she endures hours of unexplained detention at the airport. In France, the grueling bureaucracy of the immigration office fuels a destructive outburst when she returns to her apartment. And in “Vacant People,” when Hungary itself has joined the West, the closing image juxtaposes a homeless man sleeping on a bench and a sign virtuously trumpeting “This is Europe! Do not litter!” Homelessness is a deeply felt cause for Tóth, and a recurrent theme for authors who grew up on the—purportedly—wrong side of the Iron Curtain only to encounter blithe disregard for basic human needs after they became “free.” (This issue is also starkly presented in Jenny Erpenbeck’s latest novel, Kairos.)

No story explores the line between East and West better, and more amusingly, than “Tepid Milk,” which, in addition to the totemic barcode, personifies the West in Kathy, a blonde American exchange student who stays with the narrator’s family. Kathy keeps her shoes on in the house, fears the family dog, and sleeps until late in the morning, leading the narrator’s mother to demand that the family “flush the toilet quietly.” When the narrator’s crush starts to show an interest in the foreigner, it means war. “Each day that week I brought further evidence of the American girl’s idiotic behavior.” Her actions grow increasingly desperate, in ways universally recognizable to anyone who has been heartsick and young, but they also reveal that no matter the despair or fatalism she is feeling at the time, the woman telling these stories still cares enough to fight for the world beyond her reach.

What she doesn’t know, both because of her age and because of the hazy curtain of history, is that lines change—even borderlines between nations—and sometimes reemerge in different guises. Barcode repeatedly reminds us to reassess the divisions we perceive around us, in the present day or in the past, because the stories associated with them won’t go away. 

Barcode by Krisztina Tóth, translated from the Hungarian by Peter Sherwood (Jantar Publishing, 2023).

© 2023 by Cory Oldweiler. All rights reserved.