Hungarian literature – findingtimetowrite

#ReadIndies and #HungarianLitMonth: Metropole

Ferenc Karinthy: Metropole, transl. George Szirtes, Telegram Books, 2007.

The book was originally published in 1970 in Hungary but needed over 35 years to get translated and published by a literary fiction imprint of Saqi Books (thus fitting into the indie publishers reading project). It’s been lurking on my Kindle for quite a while, and I finally took the opportunity to read it to fit with Stu’s Hungarian Lit Month initiative for this February.

Hungarian linguist Budai is on his way to a conference in Helsinki but gets on the wrong plane and ends up in a town and country where he can’t understand a word of the language, nor read the writing. He’s staying in a hotel where no one seems to understand any of the languages he attempts to use. The city is grey and constantly full of commuters, rude people pushing him aside with their elbows. The population is mixed, of all races, so he cannot even guess what continent he is on. He cannot find an airport or railway station, the maps make no sense to him. The only person who seems to show him any compassion is the girl operating the hotel lift, who might be called Epepe or maybe Pepet or Bebe or Tchetchetche… the fact that he can never quite catch or confirm her name is typical of this story of incomprehension. And maybe also a dig at the mentality of certain types of dominant cultures when deciding that a foreign name is too difficult to pronounce.

It’s an odd book: dystopian and disquieting, but also quite funny (and occasionally disturbing). It’s been compared to the nightmarish worlds of Kafka or Jose Saramago, but it also reminded me of the claustrophobic conditions with apparently no escape of On the Calculation of Volume by Solvej Balle. There is a lot of information about linguistics and writing which I personally enjoyed, given my own formation as a linguist, but which I can see might be a bit dull for other readers. I think the author is also making a little fun of the Hungarian language, because the way he describes this strange language sounds an awful lot like Hungarian might sound to people who’ve never heard it before.

It’s also a great metaphor for the culture shock experienced by expats I used to work with, when their attempts at using logic to settle into a new culture failed, because there was nothing familiar to which one might compare things, and none of the usual rules seemed to apply. The only complaint I have is that these scenes do feel a little repetitive – probably a deliberate stylistic choice.

The city itself naturally becomes one of the main characters in the story. It is vast and bewildering, possibly a metaphor for how urban sprawl is causing alienation.

The city spread over a plain into distances further than the eye could see. Whichever way he turned there was no end to it, nothing but houses and apartment blocks, streets, squares, towers, old and new quarters of town, mildewy storm-battered rented barracks and skyscrapers faced with modern marbles… and chimneys, chimneys everywhere he looked, chimneys like so many long-necked dragons stretching towards the sky…

Sounds like the view of Tokyo from a skyscraper (albeit with no chimneys). Gradually, the longer Budai stays in the city, he begins to notice all its shortcomings. This is another typical stage of culture shock – after the curiosity and anticipation of the honeymoon stage, then anger, depression and hostility of the rejection stage. But what he describes will be familiar to anyone living in a big city anywhere in the world.

Filth and mess everywhere – had it been like this from the beginning or had he simply not noticed? When the wind blew, as it was doing now, it lifted and carried the discarded wrappers and other rubbish with it… He noticed how many old people there seemed to be in town: lame, crippled, half and half-paralysed, they stumbled, lurched and staggered on sticks through the crowd… Waves of alien humanity regularly washed over them. Frail old grannies, sickly frightened little sparrow struggled against the overwhelming crowd, dragging their helpless bodies along… constantly being shoved aside, squashed and trodden on in the mêlée… Then there were the crazies, those who wriggled and babbled, who talked and muttered to themselves, the furious who screamed and roamed the streets uttering terrible cries… Then the mumbling beggars thrusting tins in front of passers-by, the moaning, the insane, the paralysed, the skeletal, the subnormal crawling on all fours – all of them full of the desire to live…

Despite Budai’s unlikeable, prickly nature, full of self-pity yet also prone to turn violent when feeling helpless, it’s hard not to feel some sympathy for him when things take a turn and he finds himself kicked out of his hotel. He sleeps rough on the streets, works as a labourer to make a tiny amount of money for food and, above all, for drink. These passages reminiscent of Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London show just how easy it is to reach rock bottom.

Having finished work Budai too took to the bar in the next street… It was part of his current way of life, after all, much more so than a clean shirt. Where was he to wash a shirt? His lack of resources also had him choosing between clean underwear and getting drunk, and it was in perfectly sober mood, after considerable thought, that he opted for the latter. His situation would have been simply intolerable without alcohol.

Having recently read several books about the immigrant experience, and how constant ill-treatment, poverty and poor living conditions make one an angry, selfish and ‘bad’ immigrant (see Drndic’s Canzone di Guerra, for example), I was not surprised to see Budai becoming hostile and aggressive. [Incidentally, last night I watched Enjoy Your Stay, a film about undocumented Filipino workers in a luxury Swiss resort, and that too raised the question of the point at which being a victim of exploitation forces you to lose your own humanity and exploit others in turn.]

Wherever he wandered in town – and now he was deliberately crossing roads against the lights – he strewed rubbish, trod over floral borders and generally sought to break as many rules as he could. He had convinced himself that such rules had nothing to do with him, that he did not belong here, that he was simply a foreigner, an alien. If someone pushed him in the crowd, as often happened, of course, he craftily kicked the person back, or hit him with his fists, or if he lacked the opportunity to do that immediately, kept following the guilty party until he caught up with him and was able to exact full revenge by beating, slapping, punching and tearing at him. When he passed an empty telephone box he would enter, tear off the receiver and crush it under his heel. He would kick over the rubbish bins people had put out in front of their houses and enjoy seeing the rubbish spill out. He would throw stones at windows at night and smash streetlights.

Budai then gets caught up in some kind of workers’ strike or revolution – of course, he has no idea what is going on but simply gets swept along by the crowd, participates in the siege of a building, even gets a gun pressed into his hand and is expected to shoot, and then finally witnesses some revenge scenes and executions, very much in the brutal style of Blindness by Jose Saramago. But the next day, everything seems to have been cleaned up and forgotten. This reminded me of the Tiananmen Square protests (I went to Beijing for the first time just a month or two after the events), but for the author it might have been a reference to the 1956 Hungarian uprising and how the memory of that was instantly suppressed. Those of us used to censorship tend to see elaborate political metaphors everywhere we go. What does emerge from his biography is that for the next 4 years after 1956, he gave up his journalistic activities and dedicated himself predominantly to translation.

Incidentally, the name of the novel in the original Hungarian is Epepe but I feel that the publishers were wise to use Metropole instead, partly because the city is a main character in the story, while Epepe is initially marginal and later on disappears from the story, and partly because the crowd scenes and huge tower blocks remind one of the Fritz Lang film Metropolis.

Photo from Femina.hu with the occasion of centenary of his birth

Wikipedia has the following rather intriguing entry about Karinthy Ferenc (Hungarian name order is the same as in the Far East – surname first, followed by first name): a Hungarian novelist, playwright, journalist, editor and translator, as well as a water polo champion.

George Szirtes is the translator and I’ve loved his poetry and translations for many years now. I believe he deliberately chose a slightly more old-fashioned vocabulary when translating this book, perhaps in keeping with the time it was written, but also giving it a certain timeless fable-like quality.

My First László Krasznahorkai

After all the brouhaha about Brodernism and difficult authors, I just had to read a book by Hungarian author László Krasznahorkai, foremost representative of this movement, right? I have Satantango and Seiobo There Below on my bookshelf, but I actually started with something shorter and more manageable. Thank you to Tony for recommending it – as soon as he said Genji’s grandson is involved, I was sold on the idea and ordered the book.

László Krasznahorkai: A Mountain to the North, a Lake to the South, Paths to the West, a River to the East, transl. Ottilie Mulzet, Tuskar Rock Press/New Directions, 2022

Although the title is a real pain to remember and write, I can never resist a book about Japan, even when it is written by a foreigner (which has often led to disappointments and cliche representation in the past). And there is quite a bit here where it feels like the authors has ingested an encylopedia about Japanese Buddhism, or traditional arts and crafts. Nevertheless, it is a poetic, slightly surreal account of a quest, which could take place anywhere but is very much anchored in a specific place, namely a small town on the outskirts of Kyoto. Although never mentioned by name, all of the descriptions (including the mention of the Keihan train line) make me think this is Uji, the place where the last few chapters of Genji Monogatari take place and which refer to Genji’s grandsons Kaoru and Niou.

So it is very fitting that Genji’s grandson – who seems to still be alive after a thousand years, for the book is set in the present-day – should wander around the streets of Uji searching for a monastery and, within it, searching for a hidden garden, which he believes he saw mentioned in a book once… except the book has gone missing and no one has ever been able to find the garden.

There is something eerie about the empty streets, a deep hush seems to have descended upon the place, only the train and the stationmaster appear to be going about their business. There is one particular chapter describing the silence before the storm which brought to mind my first unforgettable visit to Uji, just as a typhoon was announced, when I too wandered down deserted streets and had the Phoenix Pavilion all to myself. It’s hard to find a passage to quote, because Krasznahorkai does have the tendency to run on and on all in one sentence:

… this black lethal mass which suddenly made everything grow dark; there was silence, the birds all around grew silent, the gentle breeze died down, and then there arose a moment, and everything simply stopped: a moment during which the entire world came to a stop, and for this one single moment the murmuring of the leaves stopped , and the flexible swaying of the branches stopped; and in the conduits of the trunks and the stalks and the roots, circulation stopped…

However, it could also be a reference to that blank chapter in Genji Monogatari, mourning the death of Genji and how all the light seems to seep out of the world. I’m pretty sure that Krasznahorkai knows his Genji, because there’s also a later chapter praising the luminous beauty of the grandson, which is very similar to the way Murasaki Shikibu describes Genji himself.

This is more of a prose poem than a novel. The action, such as it is, consists of Genji’s grandson stumbling about the streets and then the grounds of the monastery in search of the mysterious garden, being sick, recovering, briefly praying and remembering. It also describes, more amusingly, a retinue of eight or ten men searching for Genji’s grandson, who has given them the slip. They are all wearing European clothes and they are all ‘thoroughly hammered’. Needless to say, they fail miserably in their mission, and the only person whom they encounter, an old lady, thinks they are pigs making no sense whatsoever, since she hasn’t even heard of Genji.

There are many beautiful descriptions of landscapes, buildings, architectural details, Buddhist sutras, the origin of eight himoki trees and a rather heartbreaking story of a dying dog. There is a dream-like atmosphere, a slight chill and otherworldliness about it that makes you wonder if this is in fact a ghost story. But there were moments when the book tried my patience severely, for example, when talking about a book authored by Sir Wilford Stanley Gilmore, consisting almost entirely of Arabic numerals… and then proceeds to describe those numerals over four or five pages. Of the Cartarescu ‘Help help’ school of thought and quite unnecessary! As for the lengthy descriptions of Japanese (and Korean) craftsmanship in carpentry and so on, although I did quite like them, let me never hear people complain about Balzac going off on a tangent about paper quality and printing procedures in Lost Illusions, or Melville shoehorning in everything he knows about whaling into Moby Dick.

Despite those flaws, I rather enjoyed my first encounter with this Hungarian author, possibly because of the setting and subject matter. I gather Japan makes another appearance in Seiobo There Below, so I’m looking forward to reading that in the future.

As for the translation, I felt it captured that state of fugue and unknowing very well, partly because it translated none of the Japanese terms, simply assumed the reader would understand or at the very least search for them online. There is a refined choice of words, as befits a descendant of Prince Genji, and a musical quality which makes certain passages (I was going to say paragraphs, but there aren’t many of those) really sing when read out loud.

This is likely to be my only post for this week, as I have London Book Fair and other events going on. However, let me just add that I’ve read Kawakami’s Under the Eye of the Big Bird, which I found quite haunting (to be reviewed later) which gave me a craving for more Japanese literature, so I read another Abe Kazushige, and am also currently in the midst of another family saga (after Pachinko and The End of August), this time set in Malaysia, Evening Is the Whole Day.

#1937Club: Journey by Moonlight

Antal Szerb: Journey by Moonlight, transl. Peter V. Czipott, Alma Classics.

I’m late to this book, which everybody assured me I would love – and guess what, they were right! In fact, I loved this dreamy yet incisive look at nostalgia and romance so compelling, that I promptly ordered all of the other Antal Szerb books I could find in translation. His life was tragically cut short in a concentration camp in WW2, but he was quite a prolific author and literary historian, so there is lots to explore. With his Jewish heritage, widely travelled European sensibilities and beautiful prose, he reminds me a lot of my favourite Romanian writer, Mihail Sebastian, and has the same clear-eyed view of the charm but also the shortcomings of the Hungarian bourgeoisie and aristocracy that Miklos Banffy conveys so well in his Transylvanian Triology. But I am basing these comparisons on this book alone, and as far as I can see, his other books seem to be wildly different (a parody fantasy novel, a surrealist political novel, a historical novel etc.).

Mihaly and Erzsi are travelling through Italy on their honeymoon, but, although Mihaly prised his wife away from her first husband and might therefore be considered a happy man, he seems to prefer to wander off on his own, dwelling on the past, and his friendship with the sophisticated but strange siblings, Tamas and Eva. Tamas has died and Eva has disappeared, but he never loses hope of finding her again. While weltering in nostalgia, Mihaly misses the train to Rome that he and Erzsi were supposed to take together, but instead of jumping onto the next one, he seems to relish his freedom and embarks on a detour, meeting new people but also confronting his own past. Meanwhile, Erzsi starts questioning her choices too – obviously.

Mihaly is really rebelling against the expectations of his family and society, that he should take over the family business (which he has no interest in). His marriage was his last attempt to fit into the conventional bourgeois lifestyle, while for Erzsi it was the elopement with him that was the act of rebellion. With such mismatched expectations for their union, it is not surprising that they drift apart. Mihaly is lost in reflective nostalgia, as opposed to restorative nostalgia. As the translator points out in his afterword, restorative nostalgia is all about coming back home or reconstructing the lost home, while Mihaly thrives in the longing itself and delays the homecoming, for fear it might not match up to his memories.

For so many years I did everything to conform, and when I thought that at last everything was in order and I’d finally made my peace with the world, then I married you to reward myself. And that’s when all the demons assailed me: my entire youth and all the nostalgia and all the rebellion. There’s no medicine for nostalgia. Perhaps I should never have allowed myself to come to Italy. They built this land out of the nostalgia of kings and poets. […]

The world doesn’t allow a man to give himself over to nostalgia… it doesn’t tolerate any deviation from the norm, any escape and defiance…

This melancholy musing is of course right up my street, but the book is full of humour too. Mihaly is often very observant and funny about the countries he has been in, for example when he says that ‘November in London isn’t even a month, but a spiritual condition’. He encounters the spirited, good-natured but vacuous American girl, Millicent, and that leads to some humorous exchanges.

The book is of course full of local atmosphere of Italy: the colours, smells, sounds and sights which Szerb clearly adored and also wrote about in a diary of a trip to Italy. His protagonist Mihaly is initially more ambiguous about Italy, a place he avoided visiting. And now that he is there, he loves the country but can be quite critical about the Italians, and much of what he says sounds chilling and prophetic in 1937, not just for that country:

His instincts told him that, in Italy, the identity of those who wielded power – and the principles in the name of which they ruled the people – didn’t matter at all. Politics only touched on the surface; the people – the vast, vegetative Italian people – bore the changing times on their backs with amazing passivity, and they didn’t acknowledge having anything to do with their magnificent history.

This was probably my favourite of the books that I read for the #1937Club, and that includes Virginia Woolf’s The Years, which is saying something, since she is one of my favourite authors (although The Years is not my favourite of her books).

There is another translation of this book by Len Rix, who is also the translator of Oliver VII, both published by Pushkin Press. I cannot pronounce myself on that translation, but I really enjoyed this one, which has the dreaminess but also a certain world-weariness that I can imagine might have overcome many European authors in the second half of the 1930s. I should also add that there is a further translation by Peter Hargitai, which was the first of them all, and that there is quite some controversy surrounding the Len Rix translation, which Hargitai claims is plagiarised. You can catch a glimpse of this in the comments to the excellent review post by Max Cairnduff. Other reviews of this book, which each emphasise a slightly different aspect than I do (so you should read them all): Emma from BookAround, Simon from Tredynas Days, Karen from Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings and Tony Malone.

Creepy Mansions in Hungary, Mexico and the Adirondacks

The cover certainly adds to the sense of mystery and ‘Old World’.

Márai Sándor: Embers (The Candles Burnt to the End), translated by Carol Brown Janeway, 1942 (published in English in 2001 by Alfred Knopf and in UK in 2003 by Penguin)

In theory this book that I read for London Reads the World Book Club should have appealed to me tremendously. It has that Central European sensibility, the author has been compared to Stefan Zweig, it mourns a lost world like Miklos Banffy’s Transylvanian trilogy, critics say ‘it works as a novel of suspense whose denouement is as exciting as a detective tale’ and it all takes place in a gloomy castle at the foot of the Carpathian mountains.

And yet… although I enjoyed parts of it quite a bit, overall this book left me unsure.

The owner of the castle, a former general in the Austro-Hungarian army, has invited his old friend Konrad, whom he hasn’t seen for forty-one years for a formal dinner by candlelight. At this dinner, the General brings up all the resentment and pain that he has felt for decades because he is convinced that his (now dead) wife and his friend were having an affair and possibly planning to kill him. While it’s understandable that this might infuriate him, in actual fact the General has been nursing this grievance so much that it has stopped him from really living his life. There is more than a hint of homoeroticism about his feeling of betrayal by his friend, especially since he seems to value male friendship above and beyond any marriage. However, his greatest anger and regret is that he was never able to understand either his wife (or his mother) or his friend and their passion for music. The way he speaks about his wife gave me a very ‘My Last Duchess’ by Robert Browning vibe.

Whether we think of this as a metaphor of the old vs. the new generation (the General comes from a wealthy aristocratic family, while Konrad is from a more humble Galician background and then gets involved in merchant-type work in the Far East), I am not entirely sure if the author intended us to find the General as repulsive as I did (not that Konrad is pure as drive snow either), whether he is rejoicing or mourning the death of such old-fashioned values (or simply feels ambivalent about them). There were a few scenes from his childhood, where you felt that he might have become someone different, but he had no choice but follow the family tradition.

One could argue that the bitter, lonely old General with the victim mentality is the way that Hungary likes to see itself at certain points in its history – and I simply cannot tell if Márai condones or criticises this (it is much clearer that Banffy is highly critical of the inertia of the Hungarian noblemen). It certainly didn’t help when I heard that Hungary’s authoritarian PM Viktor Orban claims this is his favourite book, often quoting things such as: ‘The miracle is not that Hungary is the way it is but that it still exists.’

Yet the passages about Vienna in particular really resonated with me (this is where the two men met as youngsters attending the military school). Here’s what Konrad says about it:

Saying the word Vienna was like striking a tuning fork and then listening to find out what tone it called forth in the person I was talking to. It was how I tested people. If there was no response, this was not the kind of person I liked.

Vienna wasn’t just a city, it was a tone that either one carries forever in one’s soul or one does not. It was the most beautiful thing in my life… Vienna was like another friend. When it rained in the tropics, I always heard the voice of Vienna.

There are also some really beautiful descriptive passages (although one might argue that the General does go on a bit and that no guest would put up with such haranguing and whining for uninterrupted for chapters at a time). Although they seem to glorify hunting, they also give a description of the deep forest surrounding the castle, where the General has retreated to just a few rooms in one wing, and everything else is falling into ruin.

It is no longer dark, it is not yet light. The forest smells so raw and wild, as if every living thing – plants, animals, people – were slowly coming back to consciousness in the dormitory of the world, exhaling all their secrets and bad thoughts… The scent of wet leaves, of ferns, of crumbling tree trunks, of rotting pine cones, of the soft carpet of fallen leaves and pine needles slippery from the dew, rises up from the earth to assault you like the smell of two lovers locked in sweat-soaked embrace… It’s the moment when something happens not just deep among the trees but also in the dark interior of the human heart, for the heart, too, has its night and its wild surges, as strong an instinct for the hunt as a wolf or a stag.

The description of the castle is also very evocative: it is a mix of the ‘East’ European splendid isolation and wilderness (‘the forest with bears’, as the Emperor of France calls it) and West European extravagance. But now it too stands sinister and haunted, resentful and claustrophobic:

The castle was a closed world, like a great granite mausoleum full of the moldering bones of generations of men and women from earlier times, in their shrouds of slowly disintegrating gray silk or black cloth. It enclosed silence itself as if it were a prisoner persecuted for his beliefs, wasting away numbly, unshaven and in rags on a pile of musty rotting straw in a dungeon. It also enclosed memories as if they were the dead, memories that lurked in damp corners the way mushrooms, bats, rats and beetles lurk in the mildewed cellars of old houses. Door-latches gave off the traces of a once-trembling hand, the excitement of a moment long gone, so that even now another hand hesitated to press down on them. Every house in which passion has loosed itself on people in all its fury exudes such intangible presences.

I should say that I’d read the book more than 20 years ago in Romanian translation and was convinced it was set in Transylvania but there is no specific mention of a place, other than that it was a territory formerly belonging to Hungary, and since the author was born in Košice in eastern Slovakia, at the foot of the Ore Mountains, it might be safer to assume that the castle is located around there.

Sylvia Moreno Garcia: Mexican Gothic, 2020.

The cover does not feature the house, surprisingly enough, so only very slightly hints at the horrors within.

The line about the mushrooms and the mildew quoted above certainly chimed well with this book, written in English by this American author of Mexican heritage. Her rotting mansion is even more isolated and sinister, the host’s intention is even more evil and the suspense escalates into real danger.

Set in Mexico in the 1950s and inspired by a real silver mine town with an English cemetery, the book tells the story of spoilt wealthy socialite Noemi, who is sent by her father to this isolated mansion High Place, to see what is happening with her beloved cousin Catalina, who married in great haste the (impoverished) heir of this (now closed) silver mine and has been locked up in that eerie house ever since.

All the great Gothic tropes which appear accidentally in Embers are very deliberately placed here. There is plenty of suspense, plenty of surly and untrustworthy characters, graveyards and nightmares, shadows creeping about at night. The writer breathes new life into these clichés through the strength of her main character (I was less convinced by some of the others). Noemi might be completely alone and helpless, she might start doubting herself, but she is not stupid, not easily intimidated, she does not give up. I imagine her as the Katharine Hepburn character in High Society. The atmosphere is brilliantly creepy – the house itself becomes more than a setting, it is a character all by itself, the source of fear and danger.

The house loomed over them like a great, quiet gargoyle. It might have been foreboding, evoking images of ghosts and haunted places, if it had not seemed so tired, slats missing from a couple of shutters the ebony porch groaning as they made their way up the steps to the door, which came complete with a silver knocker shaped like a fist dangling from a circle. “It’s the abandoned shell of a snail,” she told herself…

While I guessed some of the story of the house and the family, there were still some surprising twists there, although the ending was slightly disappointing. However, for me this book was not about the plot as much as about the atmosphere – and it certainly had that in spades.

Julia Bartz: The Writing Retreat, 2023.

The third book I also enjoyed more for its atmosphere than its plot, although originally it was the plot that drew me in. It’s interesting that the American cover is anything but subtle and features the Gothic house in the Adirondacks where most of the story takes place, while the UK cover opts for subtlety and atmosphere.

As a writer, who hasn’t dreamt of winning a coveted month-long writing retreat in an idyllic location, especially one that is tutored by an author you hugely admire? For Alex, who has not been having much success with her dream of becoming a published novelist, it certainly seems like a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. She is not about to let the fact that her former best friend Wren will also be there spoil her delight. Nor the fact that the house has a reputation for being haunted. But when their tutor Roza starts playing nasty mind games with the participants, and Alex becomes a little too obsessed with the history of the previous owners of the house, things take a nasty turn.

At first glance, however, the house seems plush and extravagant rather than sinister (although any place with no mobile or Wifi reception should raise suspicion):

We zoomed through the entryway into a large front hall that rose at least fifty feet above us. An enormous marble staricase swept fown from a second-floor landing. Large paintings filled the walls – to the left, abstract shapes, to the right, looming figures. A chandelier hung suspended over the staircase, casting light with hundreds of electric candles. The space was grand, majestic, and a stream of giddiness filled my veins.

What is interesting is how all this optimism and luxury starts to look menacing a few chapters later. But I guess you can tell even from this brief excerpt that the author is no Shakespeare. The other two books were certainly better written. The premise for this one was interesting, and I read it quickly enough, but it did all descend into a rather implausible mess towards the end. Fast food consumption book for my taste, which is a bit of a shame, as I think this premise could have led to even more interesting and subtle things.

#EU27Project: The Transylvanian Trilogy

It’s taaken years of mental preparation and gradual acquisition of books, and about a year in the reading (the first volume followed by a gap and then a rather breathless devouring of the two remaining volumes). But I’ve finally done it: finished the entry for Hungary in my #EU27Project. And what a magnificent entry it is: Miklós Bánffy’s trilogy The Writing on the Wall, a.k.a. The Transylvanian Trilogy.

I have to admit to a stuttering start with it. I picked it up at least three times to read the first 10-20 pages and got lost in the profusion of unfamiliar names and events. But once I found the key that opened the door, I was rewarded with an entire (vanished) world that I had difficulties letting go of…

It’s a monumental work, running to 1392 pages, yet my feeling by the end was that it finished too soon, because it barely addressed the war and its aftermath. So, for people comparing it to War and Peace, I would say it’s more peace overshadowed by the gathering clouds of war. It is far more similar to Joseph Roth’s Radetzky March, mourning the loss of the same empire from the point of view of minority ethnic groups who have benefitted from the Empire, but have an ambiguous relationship to it.

Bánffy himself was an incredibly interesting man, a politician as well as a writer, mature and liberal, suspicious of both Hungarian and Romanian nationalism, trying a conciliatory middle ground after the Versailles Treaty, a rapprochement to the Allies during the Second World War (during the period when both Hungary and Romania were in the German camp) and somehow forever caught in the middle as a proud Transylvanian. He lived long enough to see his beautiful home,
Bonțida, the inspiration for Denestornya in his book, destroyed by the retreating, resentful Germans, and his ‘homeland’ or ‘heartland’ occupied by the Soviets.

Banffy Castle, Bonțida. Renovations have started on it in the past couple of years.

It must have been even more heartbreaking ultimately than described the final chapter of his trilogy, where he allows himself to utter a cry of despair:

Now this beloved country would perish, and with it most of his generation… that deluded generation that had given importance only to theories, phrases and formulae, that had ignored all reality, that had chased like children after the fata morgana of mirage and illusion, that had turned away from everything on which their strength was based, that denied the vital importance of power and self-criticism and national unity.

This is a family saga as well as a description of Hungarian society in the ten years preceding World War One. All of life seems to be present in its pages: we have a love story (several, in fact), affairs, friendships, betrayals, disappointments and heartbreaks, political intrigue, fraud and loving descriptions of a landscape (and its people) that clearly meant a lot to the author.

I certainly enjoyed reading about the fancy dress balls in Budapest, charity bazaars in Koloszvar (Cluj), carriage processions drawn by Lippizzaner horses bringing guests to a hunting party in Slovakia, weddings and parties, duels and conmen, romantic moonlit serenades, jinks and high spirits like stealing cows by youthful members of the privileged elite to prove the laziness of the nightwatchman… and yet… I felt uncomfortable with the excessive wealth and pomp, the hedonistic lifestyle of many of the characters in the book in their huge manor houses and lands bequeathed to them by the Emperor, and their casual cruel references to the ‘local’ populations who were their servants. I am sure that is precisely what the author intends: there is much affection in describing that lost world, but also a chilling indictment of his fellow aristocrats’ self-indulgence and indifference to the plight of others.

Miklos Banffy and his family in front of Bontida, including his daughter Katalin, who was involved in the translation of his masterpiece.

The main protagonist, Balint Abady, tries to be fair and organise cooperatives on his land (reflecting, I am sure, Banffy’s own liberal beliefs), but the truth is many of the Magyar landlords and artistocracy were unbelievably cruel to the majority Romanian population, who were essentially their property, i.e. serfs (and not that friendly to the ethnic Germans either, who were largely merchants and craftsmen, therefore more independent – as for the gypsies and Jews, well…). Balint’s mother has a generous yet very patronising way of distributing Christmas presents, and owns such vast swathes of land that she loses sight of it and falls easy prey to those who trick her and mistreat the people living there.

Still, I can’t help melting when Banffy describes the mountains so lovingly, the same mountains that I grew up with and adore. For him, they clearly represent the Garden of Eden. There are so many moments which impregnate themselves on your retina, like Balint and the love of his life Adrienne bathing naked in an ice-cold stream high up in the forest:

They emerged from out of the thick trees onto the bank of a sizeable basin of water, almost circular, with steep banks dipping down to it that were so regular they might have been carved by the hand of man himself. Here the cranberries tumbled in tropical profusion; and here and there could be glimpsed bluebells, buttercups and pale green ethereal ferns. In the middle of the basin, some rocks rose above the surface of the water… glistening with the water that flowed around and over their smooth, polished surface.

Apuseni National Park, photo credit: Gabor Varga, Romaniatourism.com

I have a vested historical interest in Transylvania, of course, as some of my family originated there (then escaped across the mountains into Wallachia when things got too bad), so I found the political elements of the story fascinating. I hadn’t realised before quite how much tension there was between Hungary and the Austrians, despite the ‘K. und K.’ agreement (Emperor – Kaiser – of Austria, King of Hungary, so a dual monarchy and devolved parliament). Some of the speeches in the Budapest Parliament are probably taken word for word from the author’s own speeches and experiences of politics. Banffy (via Balint) is clearly highly critical of the infighting amongst Hungarian politicians, their focus on petty parochial issues instead of the major international threats heading their way.

It is, after all, a generally accepted rule that only some cataclysmic event or terrible danger can wipe away the preoccupations with the joys, sorrows and troubles of everyday life. The news was mulled over when they read the morning newspapers, argued and discussed in the clubs and coffee-houses and possibly even discussed at the family meals, but, while it was, everyday life went on as usual and most people only thought seriously about their work, their business interests, property, family and friends, their social activities, about love and sport and maybe a little about local politics and the myriad trifles that are and always have been everyone’s daily preoccupations. And how could it have been otherwise?

Most readers will skip the politics and be attracted to the diverse characters and family histories (be warned: there are lots of names and complex family alliances through marriage, it’s quite a challenge to keep track of them all). It is an immersive experience, you become so engrossed in the minutiae of their daily lives, anxieties and sorrows, that you are very reluctant to leave that world.

Above all, there are some real set-piece scenes that will linger in your mind long after finishing the books. Balint’s cousin Laszlo Gyeroffy starts out with such high hopes, optimism and talent and becomes a tragic figure, a victim of his own foolhardiness at the gambling tables; his death is ignoble and lonely. The scene of the death of Balint’s mother, by way of contrast, is beautiful, peaceful, as she slips away, surrounded by all she loved. Balint’s lover Adrienne is quite frankly annoying at times, with her dithering between passion and keeping up appearances, although of course we have to understand that she was living in different times and there are examples in the book of what happened to women who defied social expectations.

A captivating and unforgettable reading experience, and if it makes you want to visit Cluj, Bonțida and the Apuseni mountains, then all the better. I’m planning to go there next time I’m in Romania!

Apuseni Mountains, from Senior Voyage website.

Love and Being Content in a Mad, Bad World

Pascal Garnier: Too Close to the Edge (transl. Emily Boyce)

I always get something out of a Pascal Garnier book, but there are some which truly stand out. This is one of the stand-out ones. As usual with this author, it is a slim volume which leaves you ever-so-slightly moody and breathless.

It’s a simple-enough story of Éliette, a grandmother who is ‘not old enough or fat enough to be a Mémé’, who is facing life on her own after her husband’s death two months before he was due to retire. The house they had bought and renovated in preparation for their retirement is in an isolated location in the Ardèche and the life ‘which was supposed to be a never-ending holiday’. After a few months, she finds herself getting restless with this placid existence and overly helpful neighbours. She buys herself a tiny bubble car and zips around the countryside with it. Then, two kilometres away from home, just as the rain is starting, she gets a puncture. A man in his forties called Étienne stops to help and she offers to give him a lift. When he tells her he has broken down himself and is looking for a phone, she invites him into her house. Gradually, some kind of relationship develops between these two strangers, although Éliette is not the sweet, trusting old dear that people can easily take advantage of.

‘I’ll warn you now: if you’re a murderer, I have very little to lose, and there’s nothing here worth stealing unless you count the walls.’

Of course, readers familiar with Garnier’s dark stories will recognise the warning signs, but the danger only becomes apparent once Étienne’s daughter appears on the scene and Éliette finds out about the death of her neighbours’ son. I won’t tell you a word more, because these stories always veer off into unexpected, off-the-wall directions. I will just say that the similarity of the two names is probably not coincidental, as the two characters have more in common than might be apparent at first glance.

She was innocent, just like him, like the worst criminal, like the dog who kills the cat, the cat who kills the mouse, the mouse who… must kill something too. All around, in the bushes and the grass, prey and predators mingled in the same macabre dance. You could be one or the other, depending on the circumstances, all of which were extenuating. It was what they called life, the strongest of all excuses.

I rather loved this wistful but completely unsentimental look at aging, loneliness and hoping to find love or at least comfort in a world which seems to have gone crazy. This book will be released on 11th April and comes heartily recommended.

Péter Gárdos: Fever at Dawn (transl. Elizabeth Szász)

This is a fictionalised account of how the writer’s (and film maker’s) parents met and fell in love after the end of WW2. After his father’s death, Gárdos was given the letters his parents had preserved with such care for so many years by his mother.

The backdrop is anything but promising: Miklos and Lili have just emerged from Belsen and are recovering in different refugee camps in Sweden. Miklos is 25 years old, emaciated and toothless, weighs barely 29 kilos. On his way to Sweden he starts coughing up bloody foam. He has tuberculosis and is told that he has only six months left to live, but that doesn’t stop him looking for a wife. He finds a list of all 117 young Hungarian women from his region ‘whom nurses and doctors were trying to bring back to life in various temporary hospitals across Sweden’ and writes to each one of them in his beautiful handwriting. A few of them write back, but it is the letter of eighteen-year-old Lili which captures his attention. He is instantly convinced that she is the one, but over the next six months they will have to make do with writing each other increasingly passionate letters and seeing each other only three times very briefly and with great difficulty.

When they do meet face-to-face for the first time, they almost run away from each other, but instead they recognise each other in choked emotion. They are kindred souls, although they have had different upbringings and disagree about a number of things. Lili wants to convert to Catholicism, Miklos is a committed Marxist. Miklos is a dreamer with poetic licence, Lili is more timid and realistic. And, although they try to tell each other everything, they never speak about certain important things, neither then, nor later.

My father never told Lili that for three months he burned bodies in Belsen concentration camp… Lili did not tell Miklos about the day of her liberation from Belsen. It took her nine hours to drag herself from the barracks to the clothes depot, a distance of about a hundred metres… Miklos could never bring himself to tell her of his time, before he burned corpses, as an orderly in the typhoid barrack… the most ghastly block in the camp… And Lili never said a word about her twelve-day journey to Germany in a freight wagon.

This is not a book about the Holocaust, but a book about survival, about finding hope and love against all odds, when all the world around you seems ghastly and hopeless. It is anything but sickly sweet – charming, poignant and with little shots of sarcasm and humour which keep it from descending into sentimentality.

The film director originally wrote this story as a film script, then later turned it into a novel. The film came out in December 2015 (in Hungarian). Here is the official trailer on Vimeo.

https://vimeo.com/138878104