Two things filled Immanuel Kant with awe — the starry sky above and the moral law within. But for Andor Weer, a writer and the narrator of this grueling but potent novel set in Hungary during and after Communist rule, the moral law is pointedly absent. “Naturally, I am afraid,” Weer observes at the end of the book. “If I were sitting somewhere outdoors, say, in the yard of a lake-shore house, somewhere in the middle of nowhere, in the Carpathians, even then I could write nothing but that the only thing that fills me with wonder is the starry sky above me. And that is indeed very little.” Certainly nothing close to Kant’s stern moral code is in evidence here, starting with Weer’s mother, Rebeka, an actress who betrayed her own daughter in an effort to keep her Socialist party favors, only to have the party betray her right back. Her career on the stage over, Rebeka locks herself away for 15 years in an “82-square-meter crypt” of an apartment furnished with theater props (“even the toilet seat came from a flopped play”), with her son as sole companion, caretaker and emotional punching bag. (“Wherehave­youbeenson?” and “Whereareyougoingson?” she continually asks him.) As Bartis, translated here by Imre Goldstein, scrapes away at this unholy bond of love and hate (most of it seems to be hate), unexpected secrets are exposed — like what happened to Andor’s father and sister, and the story behind his girlfriend’s breakdowns.

 

Tranquility Attila Bartis, trans. from the Hungarian by Imre Goldstein. Archipelago (Consortium, dist.), $15 paper (296p) ISBN 9780980033007
The first work by Bartis to be translated into English follows Ander Weer through 15 years dominated by his oedipal relationship with his agoraphobic mother, Rebeka, while, outside, Hungary transitions from Soviet satellite to independent state. Star of Hungarian stage and screen, Rebeka is humiliatingly demoted from lead actress to supporting role in an underhanded bid to pressure her into convincing her daughter, a concert violinist, to return to Hungary. Instead, Rebeka declares her daughter dead and retreats into her apartment, where she remains until her death. Ander becomes complicit in his mother’s isolation and fuels the growing oddity of their relationship by writing brief letters to his mother as though they were written by his sister. Meanwhile, his girlfriend, Eszter, grows increasingly unstable as Ander refuses to leave his mother for her. Oddly beautiful and unsettling, the novel boldly illustrates the lengths people go to in securing their own private hells.

 

Tranquility is narrated by a writer, Andor Weér, and is a novel about the three very damaged women in his life and their intertwined relationships. The novel begins with the funeral of his mother, whom he can finally lay to rest. For fifteen years they lived together in the same apartment that she refused to leave, for fifteen years he had to endure here questioning (“Wherehaveyoubeenson?”) and general misanthropy.
Andor’s sister, Judit, was a very talented and dedicated violinist, a budding star who defected to the West as soon as she could — to escape Mom more than Communism, defection offering a buffer that she hoped would keep her at a safe distance, so that she would not longer have to try to erase herself, as Bartis nicely has her try to do. Overbearing Mom was a star in her own right, a famous actress, but her career came to an abrupt halt as soon as her daughter betrayed the motherland. The authorities tried to get her to entice Judit back, and when she couldn’t she went so far as to declare that her daughter was dead to her and even went through a semi-mock funeral, complete with coffin (an impressive but awful and creepy scene). Judit stayed abroad, the authorities were unimpressed, and Rebeka Weér’s acting career was over; henceforward she stayed in her apartment, and woe any uninvited guest who wanted to drop by for a visit …..

Andor can only stand up to Mom so much, but he does escape for short bursts. He tries to maintain the fiction of Judit staying in touch with her family by penning letters in her name and then having people who travel abroad send them, but Judit herself is never heard from again; as it turns out, the promising star was too damaged by Mom to truly make good a complete escape and turned to erasing herself again.

Andor eventually finds a lover, Eszter, but she also comes with a lot of baggage, and it’s a complicated relationship that develops. Mrs. Weér is no help, her reaction when Andor shows up at their doorstep with Eszter enough to scare anyone off. And it’s not a matter of Andor standing up to his mother: this lady is such a single-minded, narcissistic, paranoid loon that there’s nothing to be done — until she finally conveniently dies.

Rebeka Weér’s strong, if highly unpleasant, personality certainly give Tranquility much of its momentum (careening through domestic catastrophes), but undriven Andor slows things down again. He and his fumblings — and detours like a reading tour or his small attempts at escape from Mom, at least for a few days or hours — are probably a necessary antidote to his mother’s insanity, but leave the book oddly bogged down. Andor’s relationships with Judit and Eszter — especially that vacuum that Judit leaves behind, and which turns out to be even greater than he had imagined — are well done, but there are an awful lot of deeply damaged souls the Bartis is juggling here. Yes, there’s a comic side to it all too, especially Mom’s paranoid insanities, but it’s no pretty picture.

The political leads to the personal: each of the women is, in a way, determined by political circumstances — Juidt 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’s 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.

 

The first work by Hungarian postmodernist novelist Attila Bartis to be translated into English, Tranquility is a book about almost everything except tranquility. A dark psychological tale set in a nation with which most Americans have virtually no familiarity, it traces deterioration both microcosmically, through the stories of interrelated individual lives, and macrocosmically, as Hungary emerges over a 15-year period from its time as a Soviet satellite to become an independent state.

 

This 2001 book, Bartis’ third novel, packs a considerable punch in Imre Goldstein’s translation. The story is multifaceted and complex. The protagonist, Andor Weér, is a writer whose twin sister, Judit, a concert violinist, has defected to the West during an international competition. To put pressure on the family to get the sister to return to Hungary, the authorities deny Andor’s mother, Rebeka – who has been a major theater star – any future leading roles, demoting her to a bit player. But instead of trying to reach out to her daughter, Rebeka turns inward, declaring her daughter effectively dead. Rebeka retreats to her apartment, which she shares with Andor, who has a clearly Oedipal relationship with her but also has a genuine concern about leaving her alone. Even with Andor’s attempted support – which starts to assume bizarre forms, such as his writing letters to Rebeka that purportedly come from his sister – Rebeka slides further into isolation and insanity. And things are not quite right with Andor, either. He meets a beautiful woman named Eszter and the two fall in love – but although Eszter seems nurturing and caring, she also seems to have no past. Andor finds himself unsure whether to reach for his own happiness with Eszter and, if so, how – by bringing Eszter to meet his mother, or by keeping the two women apart?

 

For her part, the mysterious Eszter wants to meet Rebeka even though Andor assures her that when Rebeka is not playing a part, “she is exactly like me.” Eszter knows that – she has done some research – but wants a meeting anyway. She also wants sex in a way that Andor, his Oedipal relationship overhanging everything, has difficulty providing: Eszter “undid the belt of her robe and in fact that was the first time I saw her completely naked, when the black and white silk slipped off her shoulders. I wanted to escape but she sat on me the way God sat on the ruins of Nineveh.” The lapses into Biblical references are surely intentional – both Eszter (Esther) and Judit (Judith) are Biblical names. The stylistic flourishes are part of the developing psychodrama, too: “Now is the time I should let down roots, I thought, like oaks do, she thought, more like cedars that live longer, I thought, I love you, she thought, be quiet, I thought, I only thought, she thought, that’d be the end of you, I thought, I don’t care, she thought, can’t go on living like this, I thought, that’s the way I want to live, she thought, be quiet, I thought, I won’t be quiet, she thought, I’ll get her a live-in nurse, I thought, then you’d never see me again, she thought, I know, I thought, I was only thinking, I thought,” and on and on thusly for many more lines.

 

There is violence as well as sex in Tranquility (“considering how fond you are of human traits, you can hit pretty hard”), and there is exploration of the brutality of Hungarian officialdom: “He didn’t ask many questions, deflowering had been his weakness for many years; he liked it best if during the act fists pummeled his face, which he would not resist.” Eventually there is a violent confrontation between Rebeka and Eszter, but it resolves nothing; nor is there any certainty about which of them Andor loves, or in what way – the closest Andor comes to self-awareness is his statement to a doctor, “The essence of love is obsession.” But all his relationships are obsessive, and none seems truly to represent love. Certainly none leads to tranquility, and none to freedom, the linchpin of both the personal story here and the societal one. Tranquility is a bleak book filled with bleak characters and leading inevitably to a bleak ending; resignation to a world of bleakness is, it seems, all the tranquility one can expect in Bartis’ constrained world.

 

Bartis’s third novel (and the first to appear in English) is what György Konrád’s The Loser (1982) was for an earlier epochal shift in Hungarian history: its narrator’s struggle toward primarily emotional freedom mirrors Hungary’s transition from socialism to democracy. Winner of the Sándor Márai Prize when it was published in Hungary in 2001, this work has been superbly translated into English. When the narrator’s twin sister emigrates during an international violin competition, his mother—a well-known actress—is denied future roles. As a result, she exiles herself to their apartment for the remainder of her life. Despite the toll her increasing insanity takes on him, he dutifully cares for her. He is a tortured soul, at times narcissistic and cruel, compassionate and generous. Ultimately, he comes to believe that freedom, which he defines as “the kind of condition in which nothing ties us to the world,” is a condition unsuited to humans. The novel’s irony and humor are both shaded by its overall darkness. Though some readers might be uncomfortable with the amount of violence and sex, Bartis’s tremendous talent makes this highly recommended for both public and academic libraries.

 

“Tranquility” is a moving, emotionally complex, subtle, shocking novel — and the inadequacy of these words of praise might be overcome by considering imagery, such as the narrator’s “remembering how I crawled, like a creeper, upon the back of that woman. Like a slug on the wound of a decaying fruit tree.” Or this: “You live only as long as you can lie into the mug of anybody, and without batting an eye. And when you can’t anymore, well, it’s time to get hold of that razor blade.” Or this: “[The narrator’s mother’s] nakedness was like that of the dead, in whom only the corpse washer and God take any delight.”

 

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, Peter Nadas, 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.

 

Andor Weer, the narrator of “Tranquility,” is a writer of short stories entangled with his aging, controlling mother who is terrified by the thought of being cremated (she has been told that her corpse will sit up in the oven). Once a leading actress on the Budapest stage, she has been reduced to playing bit parts as a punishment for being unable to lure her violinist daughter back to Hungary from the West.

 

Spanning the declining years of the Communist regime, Bartis’ novel presents a form of narration that twines a record of Andor’s day-to-day life as a writer with what are surely snippets, both long and short, of stories echoing his own mastery of the short story (by which Bartis first rose to prominence in Hungary) in a novel that moves effortlessly through all levels of a truly damaged society attempting to recover from communist devastation.

 

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.

 

Bartis creates an atmosphere of believability in this novel without forsaking the use of irony. Early in the story, for instance, Andor reads a short story to a provincial audience about a homicidal priest who kills off his congregation with poisoned communion wafers. After the reading, the priest in the village invites Andor to supper. “I’ve got a pretty good ceremonial wine, if you’ve got the courage,” he tells him. During the course of the evening, the priest reveals himself to be one of those rare members of the clergy — a priest who actually does believe in God — and, next morning, as Andor leaves on a train, the priest gives him a book as a gift.

 

It isn’t a copy of Augustine’s “Confessions” or some such but is something else entirely, which isn’t revealed for another 30 pages. What that book is won’t be identified here — no plot spoiler for readers — so get the book as soon as you can.

 

McGonigle is the author of “Going to Patchogue” and “The Corpse Dream of N. Petkov.”

 

Afrikaner Bosman (1905–1951) killed his stepbrother in 1926 and was sentenced to death, but was released in 1930 and soon began traveling. This, his first book of three published during his lifetime, was written in English and published in 1947, and it is now a classic of South African literature. The pacing and perspective of Bosman’s tales—framed “as told by” the perfectly named character Oom Schalk Laurens—are unlike anything else in English. As these 21 fable-like stories of hard luck on the veld unfold, a captivating picture of an intimate, then vanishing (and now vanished) world unfolds. The closest comparison may be Robert Frost poems or Bob Dylan songs. (June)

 

Small Lives
By Pierre Michon
Translated by Jody Gladding and Elizabeth Deshays
Reviewed by Monica Carter

 

One of the signs of a great book is that the reader feels like she is reading a great book. From the very first sentence, she knows a question has been answered, a new world has been discovered, an intellectual delicacy has been offered up to savor and more than likely, her life of reading will never be the same. It has been changed by the indelible mark of book that our memory will not let escape.

 

She senses that she is reading literature as it is intended to be. In Small Lives by French author Pierre Michon, not only are we aware that we are reading great literature, but we have the privilege to accompany him on this journey in which he discovers the voice and style that make this an outstanding work of depth, substance and originality.

 

France has long recognized the talents of Mr. Michon and his lyrical style—he has been awarded many of France’s top literature prizes for his works including the Prix Décembre, Grand Prix SGDL de literature, the Prix Louis Guilloux, and the Prix de la Ville de Paris. Similar to the recent Nobel Prize winning Le Clézio, Michon is regarded as one of France’s best contemporary authors. Yet, no matter how many prizes he has garnered in his literary career, nothing takes away from the poetic, dense prose that expose the nuances of French rural life in this framework of eight short stories in which Michon illuminates the hazy shadows of humanity.

 

These stories are imbued with a sense of loss, the bittersweet schism between what is and what could have been, a constant search for the roots of identity in a family history, and the reassurance of place. Like in the first story, “The Life of Andre Dufourneau,” in which the young boy as writer looks at a worn picture of Andre Dufourneau, the adventurous son from long ago who never returned:

 

Come now, admit it, he really resembles a writer. There is a portrait of a young Faulkner, a small man like him, in which I recognize the same haughty yet drowsy air, the eyes heavy but with an ominous, but flashing gravity, and under the ink-black moustache formerly used to hide the coarseness of the lip, alive like the din silenced by the spoken word, the same bitter mouth that prefers to smile. He moves away from the deck, stretches out on his berth, and there he writes the thousand novels out of which the future is made and which the future unmakes; he is living the fullest days of his life. The clock of rolling waves disguises the hours, time passes and place changes, Dufourneau is as alive as the stuff of his dreams; he has been dead a long time; I am not yet abandoning his shadow.

 

And although Michon follows the lives of people from the small village of Creuse, they don’t live simple lives nor are they simple people. Michon gives us the simultaneous struggle of emotions deftly and with the clarity of an epiphany. In “The Lives of Eugène and Clara,” we feel the guilt and shame of a grandson who attempts to rise above instinct when he meets with his grandfather whom he does not truly love:

 

Though, at the time, when I saw him, that was not what I thought; his illuminated sorry face—more broken than King Lear’s than clown’s, drunken old soldier, all shame drowned—his big red nose, his hands just as big and red, the incredible folds in his doggy eyelids, his croaking voice, all made me want to laugh—the laugh of the nervous child, which is a way of reversing the tragedy, of denying the unease. I reproached myself for that secret desire. To look dubiously, even ironically, upon “someone I should have loved,” to harbor that improper thought: “my grandfather is very ugly,” seemed to me a fault of the most serious nature; without a doubt, the faculty for such impious speculations belonged to “monsters,” and to them alone; was I, therefore, a monster? Immediately, I promised myself to love him better; and with that promise—the internal drama in which one plays all the roles is the emotional leaven of the so-called tender years—waves of affection for the poor old fellow washed over me again. My eyes misted with the sweet tears of atonement, and I would have liked to follow through the manifest acts of kindness; I do not know if I dared to do so at the time.

 

The mistrust of parents, grandparents and elders is a theme that presents itself in each story, sometimes prominently, sometimes faintly. Michon’s father disappeared when he was young and it is no wonder that, as a reader, we feel the parental figures are distant and austere, people to leave behind. Later, the act of “writing” becomes the ultimate father figure that is manipulative and unforgiving, leaving the narrator lonely and wandering, hoping to be assuaged by the figurative fatherly savior known as “Writing” in “The Life of Georges Bandy”:

 

This naïveté had its reverse side of twisted greed; I wanted the martyr’s wounds and his salvation, the saint’s vision, but I also wanted the crook and miter that impose silence, the Episcopal word that drowns even the word of kings. If Writing was given to me, I thought, it would give me everything. Dulled by this belief, absent in the absence of my God, I sank deeper each day into impotence and anger, those two jaws of the vise that holds in its grip the howling demand.
And, turn the screw redoubling the grip, necessary sidekick and voyeur of the infernal tortures, doubt arrives in its turn, wresting me from the torment of my vain belief to inflict an even darker agony, saying to me, “If Writing is given to you, it will give you nothing.”

 

It is no wonder that one of the two translators is a poet—his prose reads like verse and the translation is honors his style. It is difficult to point out specific passages that typify Michon’s rich imagery or the way he paints the poetry of human nature because there are just too many. The writing is layered and poignant and it is where we find the complex in simplicity and the beauty in loss. Michon has allowed us to see this in lives that are no smaller than our own.

 

 

Vies minuscles, as it was published originally by Gallimard in 1984, was the first book by the prolific French author Pierre Michon, relatively unknown to American readers but long revered in France and adored by certain American writers such as Guy Davenport and Leonard Michaels. Of his twelve books of narrative, which imagine and track the lives of figures such as Rimbaud, Impressionist painters, the author’s family and his own story, this is Michon’s third to be translated into English.

Small Lives is a seemingly fictitious work composed of eight stories, each an account of a person from the narrator’s life. The first is of an orphan, André Duforneau, taken in by the narrator’s great-grandparents as a boy, who goes on to gallivant in the Kipling-fabled Africa (though his fate is more Conradian). Little is known by the family of Duforneau, but for a few sketchy photographs and mundane letters home, though much is made by the narrator, who now recounts his childhood imagination; of Duforneau’s letters, he confesses that “I have read what I have never read.” In Michon’s pages, we see this illegitimate great-uncle first boarding the ship to Africa, “the sea wind ruffling his hair like the hand of a romantic painter” (a touch that introduces a consistent use of allusion to works of art throughout the book). Duforneau is also conceived Napoleonically, and as Faulkner; a short man, smirking and supercilious. Indeed, as Michon continues through portraits of his grandparents, ancestors, teachers and schoolmates, he persistently finds cases of potential or failed writers.

The task set for Michon’s readers is particularly arduous; his writing is so illusory and dense. Perhaps more so than Proust’s (whose influence plays a significant role in the book’s narrative devices and is eventually discussed in the narrative itself), because Michon moves faster. Crucial facts of the narrator’s life are dealt with glancingly, as are points of French history and cultural tradition, such as folk songs and stories—which make the reading even more difficult for non-Francophiles. With this in mind, the translators deserve a special mention for their work, which retains the poetry of Michon’s tight prose, full of homonyms and subtlety, and they employ an appropriate measure of alliteration and cadence.

Though Proustian in tone, and with a number of subjects shared with À la recherche du temps perdu, including the attachment to one’s mother, the book’s motifs add up to a more complete response to that other modern chronicle of the writer’s passage: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. It’s almost all here: the distant father, the cold, stifling schoolyard (haunted by two brothers who are compared to Icarus and Daedalus!), the overbearing presence of the Catholic Church, the epiphanies, the obsession with sex, and the effort to convince women of his merit as a writer.

The author’s play between narrator and autobiographer involves a vacillation of the real and the fictive, the reflective and the imaginative, and the density of the book periodically tests the equation. As Michon writes of an affair with a woman who initially picked him up in a bar, then allowed him to move in—a period in his life that succeeded a passionate but destructive relationship, which he’d held onto because of his self-loathing—he tells of a newfound belief in himself as a writer. But the work was only done in his head, for fear that, “Had I written it, only ashes would have been left on the page, like a log after it burns or a woman after an orgasm.”

Does this conclusion come from reflection on himself at the time of writing, looking back on when he once deluded himself and his women as this future Great Author back in the 1970s? Or is he merely dramatizing how he once felt? These stories are so strongly told that there’s little choice, after careful reading, but to accept the two voices as working together in a process wherein the author attempts to find the place where fiction can exist in one’s life, and therefore in the world, after believing that fiction is only “what is outside of the world.” To go and find it and come back to the world, rather than live without having made the effort, as he was tempted in his charlatan’s disgrace. To realize the potential he saw in Duforneau, who on the eve of his voyage had proclaimed, “I will come back rich, or die there.”

 

The work of one of Germany’s most revered poets are now collected in “Travel Pictures”. Excellently translated by Peter Wortsman, this excellent anthology of prose and poetry is now available to English speakers. Credited with bringing the German language into the modern mindset and style, Heinrich Heine’s work is excellent reading throughout. Highly recommended for community library literature collections.