This morning, a walk in Budapest. Said like that, it seems pleasant and harmless: the writer Nina Yargekov offers us a treasure hunt in the Hungarian capital, simply titled Budapest and published by L’Arbre qui marche. But the walk is not just for health: here is an original and performative narrative that plunges the reader into a city under tension, a city loved and hated at the same time, a city where the power displaces statues and tries to ban demonstrations. In short, a city where heritage never sleeps, even as this week, Viktor Orbán plays his political future on the eve of legislative elections that his national-conservative party could lose, and as Vice President J. D. Vance himself has made a special trip to support the main European ally of the Trump administration.
Nina Yargekov lives in Budapest, she is Franco-Hungarian, and the author of several novels, including Double Nationality, which was successful ten years ago. She willingly and fiercely chronicles Hungarian politics under Viktor Orbán, and the difficulty of now loving one’s country, and loving one’s city. This difficulty is at the heart of the book, which presents itself as both a guide and a book in which you are the hero. At the beginning of Budapest, you find yourself in Switzerland – yes. An old Hungarian woman, who left her country during the 1956 revolution, and where you spend solitary and peaceful holidays, entrusts you with a mission: to go to Budapest to meet and try to console her nephew, Rolli, who is in the grip of depression, that famous melancholy that clouds the minds of all those who love Hungary while hating it. For this, you will be equipped with a glass jar containing – your host assures you – the air of 1956. But above all, you will have the discovery of a wonderful city for you, and your enthusiasm will necessarily cure the nephew of his depression. You doubt, but you leave, find an Airbnb in the center, meet Anna, a good friend of Rolli’s, explore the city with her, before finally tackling the heart of your mission.
To wander or to go. Like any good book in which you are the hero, at the end of each paragraph you are offered multiple choices – examples: you’re hungry, go to 8; you want to buy ear plugs because the night was noisy in your street invaded by bachelor parties, go to 65; or do you prefer to visit the zoo instead of the baths, go to 42. So you move between Buda and Pest, the two cities on either side of the Danube linked into one centuries ago, from ancient castles to the old Jewish ghetto, passing through hipster cafes, overly touristy arteries, a Japanese garden, and the magnificent and luminous banks of the river. It is a book that finds all its beauty, and its humor, often cruel, in the tension that exists between the guide – formally constrained by definition – and the book in which you are supposedly free and open. In fact, the choices are not really there, you are often urged to do exactly as the author wants you to; in the same way that the guide is highly subjective and critical.
Nina Yargekov’s Budapest is more complicated than the one in the Guide du Routard. Commemorative plaques bear the traces of radical ideological choices, such as the relocation of the statue of the democrat Imre Nagy, a great man of 1956, from a central square to a peripheral one, decided a few years ago by the Orban government. A gay pride parade, finally authorized by the mayor, against national directives, both joyfully shakes the city and worries its participants. Melancholy takes hold of you too, you, the reader, as Budapest appears to you in all its complexity: a democratic, tolerant, and progressive enclave in conservative Hungary, with its limits felt, a place where one feels, like in the book, both free and constrained.
