The Geometry of Distance

by Petra Vásárhelyi, translated by Krisztina Fehér

Petra Vásárhelyi's debut in English translation arrives after two decades of critical acclaim in Hungary and across Central Europe, and it is easy to see why Krisztina Fehér's rendering has been so long anticipated. The Geometry of Distance is a novel of ideas that never forgets it is also a novel of feeling — a rare and difficult balance, and one that Vásárhelyi achieves with such apparent ease that the difficulty is almost entirely concealed.

The novel follows Ákos Veres, a Hungarian mathematician working in Vienna in the autumn of 1935, who becomes quietly obsessed with a private project: mapping what he calls the "affective topology" of the city — not streets and buildings but the emotional distances between people, the points of connection that almost happened, the trajectories of lives that ran parallel for years without touching. His maps are beautiful. They are also, as the political situation around him begins to deteriorate, increasingly desperate.

"He drew the city not as a map but as a diagram of longing — each street a possible connection, each intersection a point of meeting that had never occurred."

— The Geometry of Distance, p. 112

The novel's structure mirrors its subject. Chapters are short and precisely calibrated, the prose spare in a way that makes each image carry unusual weight. Vásárhelyi has a mathematician's instinct for when to show working and when to present only the result. The result, in this case, is a portrait of a man watching the world he thought he understood become legible in a new and terrible way — through the geometry of exclusion rather than connection.

Fehér's translation is exemplary. Vásárhelyi's prose has a precision that resists flourish, and Fehér resists the translator's temptation to smooth what the original keeps angular. The mathematical terminology in particular — Ákos's interior monologue has the texture of a proof — has been rendered with evident care. Only in one or two passages does the English feel slightly at arm's length from its own emotion, a cost perhaps unavoidable given the source material's cultivated reticence.

Where the novel is perhaps less fully successful is in its secondary characters, who occasionally feel like positions in an argument rather than people with their own interiority. Ákos's colleague Hartmann, who represents the novel's counterpoint of political pragmatism, is vivid enough in his pronouncements but not quite in his being. This is a minor complaint against a novel that achieves so much — the solitude of its central character may, in any case, demand that others appear at a certain distance.

The Geometry of Distance is, finally, a book about what it means to try to understand something — a city, a person, a century — through the instruments you have been given, knowing those instruments have limits you cannot entirely see. That Vásárhelyi makes this feel urgent rather than academic is a considerable achievement. Fehér has given English readers a genuine gift.