Krisztina Tóth - Pixel (2011), 5/10

The thirty fractured, yet eventually unified, stories of Pixel create an interesting medley of experiences, playing with the human body as a broader unifying vessel. These vignettes harken back to Calvino's Difficult Loves, a collection worthy of revisitation and modeling. The function of the novel is not entirely clear beyond its realistic depictions of life, acts which are thankfully wildly open to interpretation, and this makes the stories work as fragments of a larger corporeal image. Where the novel loses its luster is in its narrative connections, particularly those made by the frustratingly intrusive, unhumorous, and misguided narrator. Great collage stories can make interwoven narratives feel like coincidence; here they feel like, and are hinted to be, a god-like narrator playing with its readers disrespectfully. Still, there are interesting short stories in the mix such as "The Vagina Story", which tells a tale of very different, clashing romantic perspectives. This is what Pixel does best: Tóth successfully explores relatable situations of complex emotion and relationships distraught by human weakness. While unfair to Tóth, the English translation seems to have a few minor errors in print which may account for a very small portion of lost tone. Still, there are some interesting pseudo-aphorisms in the mix, such as the reflection: "Peace cannot be attained by those who strive to satisfy their desires, but solely by those undisturbed by their wishes’ incessant flow, which floods into them like rivers into the very filling, yet still ocean." (199) Most of Pixel's characters present a disparate community inhibited by identifiable human flaws, and this assembles a worthwhile larger picture of its surrounding culture.