Gergely Nagy: Angst: The handbook of the urban guerilla
Angst features a young cartoonist from Budapest and tracks his rapid rise, gradual burnout and ultimate disintegration. In the background of the events we read subtle observations and interpretations of the hidden life of present-day Budapest, its new and ever renewed character.
At last here is someone who, instead of musing over the wonders of Berlin, London and New York, takes the trouble to visit godforsaken parts of Eastern Europe such as Bukovina, Galicia or Backa – places in Romania, Ukraine or Serbia. The tattered jewel box rather than the glamorous one.
Rakovszky approaches the present time, banality, stagnation and all, with a typical female sense of reality and tact. What she shows is the wretched and miserable life of an almost-proletarian Hungarian middle class.
The piece translated here turns out to hinge loosely on King Matthias Corvinus, the most important and influential of Hungary’s rulers, and that other Matthias: Mátyás Rákosi, the leader whose misrule was the direct cause of the 1956 Revolution.
In prose, especially fiction, Arte Povera is a tough style to sell. Iván Mándy’s late work, quintessentialized by the novella Left Behind, shares qualities with not only Arte Povera but also with the beatup Baluch nomad prayer rug you hang on your wall after giving it a good wash and overcasting its edges with brown wool. Treasures found in the dust, dusted off, begin to shine in the thoughtful beholder’s eye.
An attempt to come to terms with the death of a father who narrowly escaped the murders of Nazi-allied Hungary, this short novel is a chronicle of the fraught relationship between a Holocaust survivor and his son, as well as an attempt to work through a specific historical situation: the long-lasting, and notably patriarchal, “soft dictatorship” of Hungarian Communism.
A quick glance at recently published Hungarian prose suggests that the past continues to be the most popular subject in modern literature today. László Darvasi’s latest work seems no different. First impressions, however, are frequently misleading.
In this poetic oeuvre, language is not a tool of communication but instead, its direct hindrance. “I’m bigger than any sentence, / smaller than silence” – says the narrator of one of the poems.
As well as addressing the most frequently discussed questions of the present age (physical mobility, the radical expansion of information), Seiobo also brings up a question once heavily debated but now conspicuous for its relative absence: what does it mean to be "cultured"?
This novel is truly radical in its documentation of the fundamental shift in human consciousness that occurred (and is still occurring) at the onset of the new millennium with all that it implies: the collapse of Cold War dichotomies, the new challenges to Western civilization, the advent of cyberspace.
A stark depiction of life in a Hungarian village under communism as seen from the perspective of a young child, Ferenc Barnás’ novel The Ninth recounts the events of roughly a year in the life of a young boy and his family’s struggle to subsist by circumventing and exploiting the peculiarities of the socialist system as best they are able.
Berlin-Hamlet is a rich tapestry of "subjective", "pseudo-subjective" and "meditative" texts, all related to present-day Berlin, though tinged with memories of more sinister places like Wannsee, where the decision about the systematic extermination of European Jews was taken by Nazi bureaucrats in 1942.
Out of all the stellar authors whose works arose during the first decades of the 20th century, Dezső Kosztolányi (1885–1936) alone succeeded in capturing the hearts of colleague and reader alike. Surprisingly enough, this rare sense of loving devotion is still typical of the way readers continue to regard him today.
Can someone define themselves freely? This is Kertész's great theme in this volume of essays. Collectivism, he states, far from being merely an aspect of totalitarian regimes, "is the most characteristic feature of the twentieth century… and it thoroughly sweeps away both the individual and individuality".
Similar to the character of Gyuri Köves in Imre Kertész’s Fatelessness, Gyuri Azarel is a young boy capable of intellectual observations far above what would normally be expected. Released from the rules and conventions that define an adult’s existence, a child can ask and say anything; in the case of Azarel, this results in a narrator who hides behind the mask of childhood in order to gain free expression.
In Géza Ottlik’s sparse oeuvre the posthumously published "novel" Buda claims a most special place. Appearing three years after the author’s death, Buda was not quite the long-awaited sequel to School at the Frontier (1959), his only other novel, considered by many as his major work. Yet Buda, fragmentary as it stands, is far more than a sequel. Buda stands free, an arbor vitae, Ottlik’s true monument.
Critical responses to Márai’s Esther’s Inheritance
The recent publication of Sándor Márai’s novella, Esther’s Inheritance, provides not only a new addition to a steadily growing list of Márai works available in English, but also raises a series of provocative questions in a debate that has occupied critics since the unprecedented international success of the author’s novel, Embers, in 2000.
The first volume of poet Szilárd Borbély to appear in English, Berlin-Hamlet, has just been issued by the Prague publishing house Agite-Fra, in the translation of Ottilie Mulzet, who also contributed an essay that we reproduce here in a shortened form.
A linguist gets on the wrong plane and ends up in a foreign place where he finds himself surrounded by an utterly foreign world with obscure laws, a geographic location that must be kept a secret, and inhabitants whose indifference to all of this is utterly appalling. – A 1970 masterpiece by Ferenc Karinthy, translated into English for the first time.
In the cultural mappings of Seiobo, Mediterranean Europe, Byzantium, the Near East, China and Japan exist alongside each other. These exotic, esoteric or historical landscapes become one of the most exciting terrains of the volume: in each case, Krasznahorkai questions the status of tradition and the definition of reproduction in the cultures detailed above.
What of the remnants of Eastern culture in the East itself? This is the question that prompted Krasznahorkai’s writing of Destruction and Sorrow beneath the Heavens, which the author himself in one interview termed a “literary reportage” – not quite a novel, but something more than a travel diary.
Just as the author oscillates from his beloved cities, Budapest and Berlin, to the city of his imagination, Kandor, and then back again to a stone cottage located on a windswept plateau, his works also swing from literary prose to nouveau roman, only to return once more to essays and sociological observations.
If the voice strikes one at first as a bit faux-naif or affected, sentimental even, that is vastly to underestimate what Szép patently stands for.—Tim Wilkinson's literary ramble from Kertész to Joyce and Cummings via Tandori, Calderón and others a propos of a thin book of sketches from the 1920s by Ernő Szép.
Márai’s oeuvre was shaken out of its coma after 1989, when his works were first published in Hungary, then later went on to reach international success. By leaving Hungary in 1948, he made a decision that proved to be fateful from the point of view of his oeuvre’s future in his native land; at the same time, it was a natural extension of an exile intended to be a symbolically powerful, moral reminder.
The rootedness of Borbély's poems in the literary forms of the Baroque and their religious orientation could work against their reception in the English-speaking literary world. Yet the theological stance always runs perilously close to the blasphemous, and the rigourous form is always at the point of decay.
Éva Berniczky is Transcarpathia's long-awaited, yet still very fresh-voiced story-teller. Her description of her homeland brings to mind the very best of “magical realism”; like Latin America, Transcarpathia is also a region of intersecting cultures and religions. Poised on the border of Western and Eastern Christianity, this is a world in which Ukrainians, Ruthenians and Hungarians live side by side.
Szindbad, the hauntingly charismatic, enduring traveler on journeys of the heart, may well be Krúdy’s most memorable fictional character. Kázmér Rezeda is the other major, “larger than life” figure in Krúdy’s oeuvre, appearing in six longer works, ending with the novel The Charmed Life of Kázmér Rezeda, now being translated into English by John Batki.
Oravecz records the history of the disintegration of rural culture as though he was retelling the myth of Atlantis. The Ditch of Ondrok is a three-generation story taking place in a Hungarian village, spanning from a grandfather who had fought in the liberation war of 1848 to a grandson who had emigrated to America just before the turn of the century.
The Gravel Pit Lake did well enough in Hungary but, undeservedly, failed to raise any particular storms. It took a German audience to come and throw laurels amid the waves of the lake. Over the past months, directly after its publication in German translation, the book was lauded in superlatives by the most prestigious dailies and literary forums.
The novella approaches its subject matter so delicately that only at its close can the reader know for certain whether the author has indeed seen the naked body of a woman. Well, we will disclose this here, he has.
Few works of literature have raised such a storm and caused such reverberations going way beyond their literary relevance as Esterházy’s Revised Edition. One of the greatest confessions of the age, the book recounts the story of the author finding out that his father had been an informer.
Like many of Kertész’s works, The Pathseeker is not about the trauma of the Holocaust itself so much as the trauma of survival. The self may survive but the triumph of that survival is chimerical.
Reading stage plays and cookbooks requires a split state of consciousness. As a reader, one often wonders whether it would not be wiser to actually see the play and eat the food – for example, that "green herb soup / with smoked salmon stripes".
Krúdy seems to write in a trance state, weaving webs of images that, upon reflection, astonish as evocations of the oft-forgotten Great Goddess of the Old World. Sunflower is apparently set in Hungary in the early 1900’s... plus or minus a few years/decades/centuries/millennia.
A dazzling collage of styles that evokes the tremendous heterogeneity of the contemporary cultural landscape of Central Europe, The Last Window-Giraffe is a foray into the common heritage and current aspirations shared by the people of this elusive yet ineluctable region.
Fehér’s novel contains all of the elements characteristic of Hungarian society and culture at the time of the regime change. What emerges is the often-mentioned image of a cobbled-together Hungary, complete with a motley, lurching collection of objects and people.
Móricz's novel Relations, recently published in English, is a career story in the Balzac vein, a kaleidoscopic image of the hierarchic society of a Hungarian small town, as well as a description of the "natural history" of corruption, the all-encompassing network of swindles.
Nemes Nagy: Tram – Final Station: Translator's notes
An impossible dialogue about the impossible nature of the poetic enterprise. Impossible, yet holding the promise that by fixating on the objective world like the 'hunter on its prey', we will find something that may give us a shield against the sense of annihilation.
Örkény brought something radically new to literature by creating fantastic realism, which appeared to be the only valid and viable formal solution to fit a reality that had turned completely fantastic and absurd. Behind each of the almost Dadaistic situations he depicts we sense the workings of history.
The “Holocaust” experience marks a very important strand in the thematic material of Kertész's published works, yet it is far from being his only theme, as will become clear from the English translations of two stories, scheduled to be released by the small American publishing house Melville House.
Well-known and less-known Hungarian cultural figures of the female sex elaborate their notions of female body experience across various styles from short fiction to intellectual autobiography, memoir, blog-diary, life-narrative, or hip-hop text.
A dethroned king with a dreamy nature and little aptitude in matters of finance goes into exile. – Szerb’s unduly underrated last novel, written in one of the darkest years of the last century and set in Europe in the “piping days of peace”, has been recently published in English by Pushkin Press.
The long list of the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for 2008 has been announced. Péter Nádas' Own Death, an account of the writer's heart attack, with a hundred and sixty photos of one single tree taken by the author, is among the 137 books nominated by libraries the world over. – Zsófia Bán's review.
Goat Rouge; Silver Boxer/A Short Coming of Age Story
The queer identities of the outsiders in Gordon's work – and her own public lesbian identity – are refreshing challenges to the male-dominated, heterocentric Hungarian literary canon and literary community.
Touch me not, Flore! is obviously not the beginning of a new creative stage for Márton, but rather a delightful story written by a writer liberated from some oppressing weight. The style of this book shows another facet of Márton's prose: here, his usual ”narrative arbitrariness” follows the pattern of pulp novels and operetta librettos.
Péter Farkas has made a significant step towards something that we lack. He has found a perspective from which decomposition, decay or even fatigued desires can be described without giving the impression of voyeurism.
The book seems to be an ironic game in which the didactic function of literature is questioned. Yet the situation is more complicated than that: Zsófia Bán seems to inscribe her own ideological messages into the text. Her aim is obviously to teach, not merely to amuse and delight.
"Zehuze" – that's how it goes: this quasi-magical phrase returns over and over again in this monumental novel composed of letters written by a mother to her daughter. The daughter returns to her mother's native land, Hungary, from her land of birth, Palestine, to build a happy new world...
The Spanish Bride depicts the way in which young girls' dreams turn sour, female ambitions for 'a decent life' founder and the foul destruction of amorous illusions goes past the bounds of parody and fades into bitter, grotesque tragedy.
Body and pleasure in contemporary Hungarian literature
Sensuality as a subject is becoming ever more impossible to bypass in Hungarian literature. More and more often one finds the body in the centre of literary representation and authors have no choice but to look for a language with which to describe erotic experiences which are, incidentally, known to resist classification.
There are several authors today in Hungary who describe the erosion of the village way of life, which runs parallel to the destruction of the countryside. Some do it with the passionate tone of a prophet. Háy's voice in The Kid is that of quiet desperation.
Krisztán Grecsó’s (1976) first novel promises a great deal, and delivers on most of its promise. A densely packed work, it may be read as an educational novel, the story of a mystery, a narrative probing into folk belief, a village novel or a novel about provincial Hungary.
The publication of the March 2007 (No.187) issue of the prestigious French review Action Poétique, presenting nine "new" Hungarian poets to the French reading public, deserves notice in Hungary for various reasons.
In A Snake's Shadow, Zsuzsa Rakovszky deploys her entire battery of poetic resources while also achieving a full-blooded novel. Set in a time period spanning the last decades of the sixteenth century and the first decades of the seventeenth century, the action is located in the Austrian-Hungarian border territory, laid waste by religious war.
The narrative combines the traits of a socio-historical novel with those of a family saga. As a special treat, it also offers a full review of the history of the communist idea in Hungary.
Leg of the Frozen Dog, published in 2006, is a collection of short stories written during the last ten years by Lajos Parti Nagy, an outstanding member of the Hungarian middle generation of authors, who is widely considered to be the number one master of "artistic language distortion."
An old lady whose husband has just died of cancer leaves her hometown to join her daughter, a doctor living in the capital. How the initial relief at not having to live the rest of her life alone, forgotten, dutiless, but as a help to her only child soon turns into bewilderment, then apathy, and finally to death – this is the topic of Magda Szabó's 1963 novel, originally titled Pilátus (Pilate), now published in Italian under the title La ballata di Iza (Iza's Ballad, published by Einaudi).
Satan Tango is a novel about trust and its betrayal in many forms. The message is bleak: anyone who invests trust and hope in anything or anyone is almost bound to be disappointed and can only blame themselves for giving that trust and hope in the first place. There is certainly no redemption or transcendence to be had in this world.
Attila Balogh remarked in a recent interview that he lives in three Hells: disability, Gypsiness, and poetry. He went on to say that it is only the inferno of poetry he cannot bear. His work is certainly a journey beyond and under the edges of the known world where we never dare arrive at the center.
The protagonist in this book is communism itself, one of the most dominant ideas and historical practices of modernity. More precisely, the book is about what we in this country mean by communism: the daily practice of a dictatorship which was born with the idea of communism standing by its cradle.
Zsuzsa Rakovszky's career as a writer spans 25 years, and she currently enjoys respected status as both poet and novelist. Only in the last few years has she begun writing prose, publishing two highly acclaimed novels. This year's publication of a volume of her collected poetry, Visszaút az időben (A Way Back in Time), brackets the breadth of her poetic achievements.
Sándor Márai’s novel burst onto the literary scene at the Frankfurt Book Fair of 1999, thanks to the English and the German translations. In Hungarian the book is having its renaissance. Still, from time to time, we hear voices which talk, in tones of disapproval or apology, about it being overrated, bemoaning the stormy success of a work supposedly inferior to other pieces of the oeuvre.
Závada’s book, recently published in German, has been the most successful novel of the last fifteen years in Hungary. Having sold around fifty thousand copies, it turned out to have become a canonised part of highbrow literature while also breaking through the previously hermetic boundaries of the genre and reaching the wider reading public.
The stories of Barcode take the reader on a wild ride, alternately provoking bursts of laughter and gasps of horror, often in the span of a single page.
Faludy’s description of his Arabic ideal is actually true of himself and most of his characters – to wit, they spend the greater part of their days making love, doing nothing or philosophising. – György Faludy has died at the age of 96.
The events within the castle and the pursuit of the MS are saturated in a tone of frivolity, where the chief topoi and motifs of European culture are turned inside out with an elegant and nonchalant sleight of a hand, a silk-gloved one. As an added bonus, the attentive reader gains a tremendous wealth of erudition in this totally pain-free process.
Here the aristocratic family name, instead of appearing in the list of honours of governing bodies and salons, does so on the pages of sports papers. What is more, it appears on the gigantic score screens of huge stadiums – thanks to the gifted brother, sometimes even scoring a goal.
A godless book. No one looks after Spiró’s hero, the short-sighted, ugly and scrawny Uri. No one looks after the world, either – even though the period in which Captivity is set, the first century C.E., abounds in deities.
"Either we meet death blind or we face it openly – it makes little practical difference. I prefer to face it, because this brings me a life which is more complete and, in the final balance, more joyful. You could say I am a hedonist, if you like."
Concepts such as the "greatness" of these works or, God forbid, a sensibility for transcendence are non-existent: the system offers them no houseroom. The outcome of all this is "fatal mediocrity." This is how László Földényi F. sees contemporary German literature.
"'Mother, I said they took everyone away, they raped every woman! You said they took away women here, too.’ ’Yes, but only those who were whores. You are not one,’ my mother said. They she threw herself on me and begged, ‘My dear, tell me it is not true!’ ‘All right,’ I said, ‘it is not true. They took me away just to nurse the sick.’"
The poets of this generation are talking about issues radically and unforeseeably new. Still, at the same time, we seem to understand them pretty well.
According to Péter Nádas, Pályi is the mystic of the body. He writes about the body’s experience in the broadest sense, from the infernal depths to the ecstatic heights. - Published in English by Twisted Spoon Press.
From Iván Sándor’s novel we can learn much about the real world and about the history of Eastern Europe (namely the events of 1956 and 1968, as well as the Budapest of recent times). We learn even more about the metatheses of the creatures in this world – their elective affinities about love and friendship, faith and unfaithfulness, honour and dishonour.
There are few things as annoying as barely making the train, only to realize that it is the wrong train going in the wrong direction. For Mihály, the hero of Antal Szerb’s Journey by Moonlight, however, such nuisances are inevitable and even necessary as he progresses through his ordeal-like journey in Italy.
Written by Magda Szabó (89), one of the most well-known and widely translated authors of current Hungarian literature, The Door, a manifestly autobiographical novel, tells the tale of a long and rhapsodic relationship between two stubborn women, the middle-aged lady-writer Magda and her old housekeeper, Emerence.
In advance of Imre Kertész’s first public appearance in Great Britain on 5 March at the Jewish Book Week, it seemed worth gathering together a handful of references that he has made to the English in various published works. This is mostly because they carry an amusingly equivocal edge, but they also highlight a few of the difficult choices translators sometimes face.
Imre Kertész was the topic of a panel discussion at a recent American Slavist conference in Toronto. A member of the audience expressed the opinion that to a committed American Jew like himself, Fatelessness is an artistically distinguished, even exquisite example of Jewish self-hate.
The novel is not so much about writing a biography as about the dilemmas that emerge in the process: about the impossibility of “historical authenticity.”
Though the characters are humble village people, speaking an over-simplified language, the meaning of life and the place of man in the universe are at stake here.
"Perhaps the most striking trait of the Parallel Stories, a surprising novelty even for the connoisseurs of the oeuvre is an astonishing multitude of independent stories which no realistic construction would be able to keep together. The stories of this novel are countless in the same way as one would be unable to say how many people he has met in his life. And yet they melt into one single narrative."
It is a pleasure to see how one of the most prominent writers of post-communist Hungary juggles with the re-owned cultural historical mass – the legend of the long-distance-running Esterházy family.
Závada is intrigued by the question of individual and collective responsibility in the events of the twentieth century, and the narrative form he uses makes his novel a real novelty: letting different groups of narrators speak seems to be the proper form for verbalizing all the possible questions the twentieth century raised in terms of collective responsibility.
Zsuzsa Rakovszky’s new novel is ‘a novel of boundaries’ in which ‘mother and child, man and woman seek the boundaries between them,’ straining against the bounds of the dictatorship of the 1950’s. In terms of its subject matter it is about failing to cross the border, both in the private and the collective sense. In terms of quality, however, it is about the success of crossing the boundary between the lyrical and the epical.
Endre Kukorelly: Fairy Vale, or Riddles of the Heart of Man
How can one, in spite of all the doubts and technical obstacles, tell the story of someone growing up in Budapest and its surroundings during the 60s and the 70s? How can one create a classically structured story with the help of modern and even postmodern techniques?
His talent is at its best when depicting the merciless cruelty of children, the brutality of adults, deprivation, fears arising from different roots and terror at large which is characteristic in all totalitarian systems.
The novel is indeed smothering, the book is incredibly powerful, like a ramshackle work’s procreator staying his readers with a confident hand. Stay calm! – the Whole will take effect.
Hungarian Poetry and Fiction Before and Beyond the Iron Curtain
Would I be willing to write a review of this ground-breaking anthology of Hungarian literature in English translation, the editor of HLO asked. "No" was my instant reply, I simply couldn't. It would be simpler to write about why I could not. A foolish reflex. Why not write about why not was the response.
In his review, Gergely Angyalosi claims that "[y]ou don't need to be exceptionally insightful to realize that those readers who are willing to immerse themselves in the world of Parti Nagy's most recent book should expect to experience a shift in their attitudes towards their mother tongue."
