Other Death

Forthcoming in July 2025

A forty-year-old lecturer’s descent into psychological chaos amidst the turbulent backdrop of 1990s Budapest unfolds through vivid, disorienting imagery and meditations on trauma, art, and identity.

In the 1990s Budapest, a forty-year-old university lecturer has a sudden, complete psychological and existential breakdown. Afternoons disappear and years chop and change in confusion, as he wanders the streets, searching for work. Homelessness, alcoholism, and hate are on the rise in the capital as symptoms of the regime change. Images flash up from other lives: a Boer pointing a shotgun in Johannesburg, bodies heaped up in the downtown area, a Volkswagen campervan parked by an empty phone box in Versoix, Switzerland. As he encounters new and historic traumas embedded in the lives and the buildings around him, the unnamed narrator struggles to grasp at any coherent identity. It’s only when he starts as a gallery attendant, observing the interactions between viewer and artwork, light and space, that he embarks on the slow healing routine towards clarity.

Meditations on trauma and urban space, on image and observation, and on spiritual friendships later lost echo the writings of W. G. Sebald and Thomas Bernhard. Like Vertigo meets The Bell Jar, the magnetic language of Ferenc Barnás’s Other Death draws the reader into the murky workings of a mind severely afflicted.