Word: codrescu
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Millennium madness is upon us. With the countdown to the end of the world in full swing, cultural icons assault us with visions of the coming apocalypse, passing judgment on the last century of human progress and awaiting the Second Coming and the birth of the Antichrist. Codrescu's messiah, impressively, manages to surf the web, enjoy an orgasm, save humanity and open a restaurant all in time for Mardi Gras...
...Blood Countess shows signs of that pastime. Codrescu mixes amorphous bits about the Hungarian State Archive with speculations surrounding Bathory. He further conflates legend and scholarship through his fictional Drake Bathory-Kereshtur, a descendant of the countess who lives in the U.S. and craves to be punished for a death in Hungary...
...such an outrageous character not better known? According to Codrescu, more than three centuries of Hungarian governments have suppressed the records to protect the national reputation. One Dracula was enough. But Transylvania-born Codrescu may be blowing paprika in the eyes of history. A professor at Louisiana State University, a poet and a guest commentator on National Public Radio, he also edits the literary magazine Exquisite Corpse. The name is pinched from an old surrealist parlor game in which verse and drawings are collaged from players' contributions...
...Codrescu pours on the kinks and Gothic whoopee. If he keeps it up, he could become as rich as Anne Rice. The only thing that may hold him back is his attempt to thicken his plot with serious themes. Pleating the 16th century with the 20th, Codrescu is nervously alert for recurrent patterns of evil and its handmaiden, absolute authority. At the extreme is the countess: "She would ask them to bring her the mirror on the surface of a lake. She would ask them to open their chests and give her their hearts. She would ask them to make...
...homeland, he finds skinheads and old aristocrats smelling of mothballs and sauerkraut eager to make him King of Hungary. Fortunately, the possibility is more comic than cautionary. Drake recoils at the thought of honoring his "curse of identity." So does Hungary, which, despite its share of popular reactionaries and Codrescu's imaginative efforts, is holding on to the beginnings of an enterprising democracy. A Blood Countess II might update the author's fears with a female descendant of Elizabeth Bathory who builds an international cosmetics empire with beauty products based on an old family formula...