While in the outside world a political system is collapsing, the son is trying to free himself from the net of madness, passion, hatred and lie woven by himself and three deranged women around him. -- From the reviews.
"In the world of Hungarian literature, of Kertész and Krúdy, of Konrád and Krasznahorkai, how can a writer stand out? Attila Bartis answers that question with his foul masterwork, Tranquility. First published in 2001 and in English for the first time this month, Bartis’s Tranquility is a book of unfathomable realism—by which, of course, I mean endless cruelty, depthless pain and emotional deadness. (…) Much of this power comes from the remarkable depth of depravity in this novel. The grotesque realism provides a daring contrast to the self-indulgent introspection of Weér, but no respite from the overwhelming darkness. My sense of good taste doesn’t prevent me from mentioning Andor Weér’s early dalliance with incest, but certain passages did cause me to blush uncomfortably; I won’t quote them. This book approaches sexuality like a war and the acts described are damaging and painful, to both the narrator and to the reader. This is powerful writing intent on exposing human sexuality as it exposes so many private things. More than anything else, that sense of exposure captures the central purpose of this book; nothing is sacrosanct: not religion, not government, not life, love, or motherhood. Bartis and Weér, Weér and Bartis; they touch everything normal and leave nightmarish fingerprints and filthy smears across it all."
"The first of Attila Bartis' books to be made available in English, Tranquility may come as no revelation to those who have followed the incredible explosion of literary greatness coming out of modern Hungary: Péter Esterházy, Péter Nádas, Imre Kertész, Zsuzsa Bank. Each of these writers may seem like an individual voice speaking into a solitary silence, but the effect is of a startling chorus and of a sustaining vision of how to survive in a world that is increasingly hostile to the individual imagination. (…) Bartis comes close to exemplifying Louis-Ferdinand Céline's wonderfully provocative comment that one has to be a little bit dead to be really funny. Bartis fractures any sense we have as to whether the characters -- the narrator, his sister Judit, his girlfriends, his mother and father -- are actually alive or dead. And it doesn't matter, for even the minor characters imprint themselves thoroughly upon one's memory."
"His writing is filthy and dark—every page of this book is filled with horrors and nastiness, violence and ill intentions—and his writing metes all of this out in sentences perfectly stripped of anything positive, bared to their most wretched core. (…) What does this sort of writing mean? There are certainly other writers who employ nonstop misery (Elfriede Jelinek comes to mind), but I think there’s a particular brand of humorless brutality to Bartis’s that sets it apart. For one thing, its ceaseless ferocity gives it a power, even a certain beauty. It’s not written to shock, or merely for the sake of writing in this manner. To many people (and artists especially) the world is a filthy fucking shithole and there’s no reason to cover that up with devices commonly used to take the sting out of this sort of writing. It perhaps takes a certain type of reader to enjoy an endless stream of pessimism and sourness, but for that type of reader Bartis’s novel is very rewarding. In its unflinching chronicling of misery and hatred, things that many feel but won’t or can’t talk or write about, Tranquility succeeds. There’s a certain bravery in writing like this—Bartis must be aware that no one earns money or fame with book like this—but as a result there’s an honesty that comes through both in the worldview of the characters and on behalf of the author."
"The political leads to the personal: each of the women is, in a way, determined by political circumstances – Judit by that East-West divide that it would cost too much for her to cross back into, Rebeka by the authorities' control over who can and can't appear on the stage, and Eszter by her more complicated childhood background. But aside from their causal effect, politics doesn't play much of a role in the story, even as Hungary is rapidly changing around them. Rebeka remains in her tiny bubble, unable and unwilling in any way to participate in the real world. And Andor is torn between all of this, buffeted around by the women in (and out of) his life. An interesting and very vivid psychological study, with some impressive scenes, but also some very difficult-to-take characters.”
