Iza's Ballad by Magda Szabo. (1963, translated by George Szirtes, 2016)

In May of last year I read my first work, The Door,  by one of the greatest post World War Two Hungarian writers, Magda Szabö.   The Door, first published in 1987 and translated into English in 2015 was a New York Times distinguished book of the year.   I found the portrayal of the central character, an older woman working as a maid for an upper middle class couple amazingly powerful.  At that time there were no other novels by Szabo I could access.  (I largely only E read) so I was very happy when I was offered a review copy of another of her books which has just been  translated, Iza's  Ballad.

There are four important characters in Iza's Ballad, and elderly couple, Vince and Ettie, their adult daughter, a physician,  Iza and Iza's ex-husband  Artal.   The plot action takes place over only a few months but much of the course of the lives of the characters is slowly unraveled.  Just as in The Door the impact of an older woman, in this case Ettie, on a younger adult is central to the novel.  For years Iza has supplemented her parent's pension with her earning as a physician.  This produces feelings of guilt and dependency as well as resentment.  

The mother, quite elderly is from a different world than her daughter, making her way in a rapidly developing Communist Hungary   The father, before he was blacklisted for his political views, was a magistrate. During the Nazi occupation of the country Iza was active in the occupation.  When the father dies Iza brings her mother to live close to her in Budapest to be sure she can be cared for.   On her side the mother struggled to do whatever her daughter thinks is right.  Ettie is very proud of her daughter but they come from different worlds.  The mother does not really approve of the romantic life of her divorced daughter.  Eventually the distance between mother and daughter widens.

The power in this novel is in the characters and the relationship between mother and daughter.  Much time is spent recalling the father and Iza's marriage but it is the mother-daughter relationship that is central to the story.   It is also the story of the impact on modern development on the older culture of Hungary.

Anyone who has ever become at all a partial care giver to a dominant mother will relate powerfully to Iza's Ballad.  To those new to Szabo, begin with The Door.  

         

Magda Szabó (1917–2007) was born into an old Protestant family in Debrecen, Hungary’s “Calvinist Rome,” in the midst of the great Hungarian plain. Szabó, whose father taught her to converse with him in Latin, German, English, and French, attended the University of Debrecen, studying Latin and Hungarian, and went on to work as a teacher throughout the German and  Soviet occupations of Hungary in 1944 and 1945. In 1947, she published two volumes of poetry, Bárány (The Lamb), and Vissza az emberig (Return to Man), for which she received the Baumgartner Prize in 1949. Under Communist rule, this early critical success became a liability, and Szabó turned to writing fiction: her first novel, Freskó (Fresco), came out  in 1958, followed closely by Az oz (The Fawn). In 1959 she won the József Attila Prize, after which she went on to write many more novels, among them Katalin utca (Katalin Street, 1969), Ókút (The Ancient Well, 1970), Régimódi történet (An Old-Fashioned Tale, 1971), and Az ajtó (The Door, 1987). Szabó also wrote verse for children, plays, short stories, and nonfiction, including a tribute to her husband, Tibor Szobotka, a writer and translator of Tolkien and Galsworthy who died in 1982. A member of the European Academy of Sciences and a warden of the Calvinist Theological Seminary in Debrecen, Magda Szabó died in the town in which she was born, a book in her hand. In 2017 NYRB Classics will publish Iza’s Ballad (1963).   From the webpage of The New York Review of Books.

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The Pendragon Legend by Antal Szerb. (1934, translated by Len Rix)

"And there have always been individuals, or secret societies,” he went on, “who insisted they were the guardians of some ancient knowledge. From the Egyptian priesthood it was passed down to the mystery cults of Alexandria; from the Alexandrians to the Hebrew Kabala and the Gnostics; from the Gnostics to the Knights Templar and from the Kabala to the late-medieval mystics, Pico della Mirandola, Pater Trimethius, Cardano, Raimundus Lullus, Paracelsus and finally the Rosicrucians. The Rosicrucians are the last link in the chain … ” “And then?” ......So the ancient knowledge now exists as a paradox: our rational minds can’t fathom it.. What followed—occult science—was nothing but fraud and parody: Rational Man’s fancy dress frolic with the irrational. The eighteenth-century Freemasons, the spiritualists, the theosophists, St Germain and Cagliostro all claimed to be thousands of years old. Of course they were lying. On the other hand, lots of people falsely claim that they know the Prince of Wales, but does that make his existence a mere superstition? We just can’t grasp these things with our modern patterns of thought."  From The Pendragon Legend

Last month in my observational of International Holocaust Menorial Day, held on January 27, I posted on Journey Into Moonlight by Antal Szerb.  Considered by many Hungary's greatest writer, he was beaten to death in  a forced labor camp.  Literary purists might say so what to this it does not make his work better or worse and of course they are right but it is important to me to say this.  

Journey Into Moonlight is an acknowledged master work.  The Pendragon Legend has some very good conversations and interesting things are said by the characters, it is funny and you can see the great learning and keen wit of the author.  It was Szerb's first novel and I am sure he had lot of fun writing this.  The setting of the novel moves from London to Wales and back and forth.  

The central character is a Hungarian researcher deeply into occult lore, who is also very many into the reading life.  He meets the Earl of Pendragon who invites him to visit his ancestral castle in Wales where he has an extensive ancient library with lots of "forbidden lore" texts.  Strange entities and persons have been seen in the vicinity of the Pendragon Castle, which has been in the Pendragon family for many generations and the Earl hopes the researcher can explain them.

Between the wars in England and on the continent occult theories and gurus became very popular.  Szerb is having good natured fun with the English interest in this.  Wales has a special meaning in English culture, maybe it suggests backwoods but I am not sure on this.

The book is fun to read, the unraveling of the mysteries fun. The novel is a bit stuck in time.  For me the best part of the novel was in the observations of the Hungarian researcher about the history of the occult and about various literary works.

ANTAL SZERB (1901–1945) was born in Budapest into a middle-class family that had converted from Judaism to Catholicism. He studied German and English literature at the University of Budapest, receiving a PhD in 1924. Throughout the second half of the 1920s he lived in France, Italy, and England, where he worked on his first book, An Outline of English Literature (1929). In 1933 he was elected the president of the Hungarian Literary Academy and the next year published his History of Hungarian Literature, called by John Lukacs, “not only a classic but a sensitive and profound description of . . . the Magyar mind.” It was followed in 1941 by a three-volume History of World Literature. In addition to his critical writings, Szerb produced produced many works of translation, and published newspaper articles, essays, reviews, short stories, and novels, of which The Pendragon Legend (1934), Love in a Bottle, (1935), The Third Tower (written in 1936), Journey by Moonlight (1937), Oliver VII (1937), and The Queen’s Necklace (1943) have been translated into English. Having lost his university teaching position as a result of Hungary’s anti-Semitic laws, Szerb was sent to a labor camp, where it is believed he was beaten to death. He was survived by his wife, Klára Bálint, who died in 1992.   From the publisher New York Review of Books

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Journey By Moonlight by Artal Szerb. 1937 A post in observation ofInternational Holocaust Memorial Day January 27, 2016

This week, in what I hope will become an annual event on my blog, I am posting on works by authors who died in the holocaust, holocaust memorials and historical works.  I will loosely define a holocaust as a mass killing of a group of people based on their race, religion, or geographic location.  There have been holocausts as far back as recorded history goes and they are still going on today.  I know that many more than Jews were killed in the Holocaust.  Much of the trouble in the world today was set in motion by the Holocaust.  

On January 27, 1945, seventy one years ago, the greatest Hungarian writer of the 20th century, Artal Szerb, was beaten to death in a forced labor camp in Balf, Hungary at the age of forty four.  This post is what I can do to honor his memory.  

Journey by Moonlight is considered Szerb's masterwork.  I was mesmerized by the beauty of the book and spellbound by the powerful intelligence i felt in contact with.   The central character of the work is a member of the Hungarian upper class, a bourgeois when that designation actually meant something.  He is obsessed, as was the author with Italian civilization and art.  He sees but can't quite understand a contrast by the eternal beauty of Italian art and the decay of Italian society under the fascists.  This is not an overtly political book at all, Szerb is far to great an artist for that.  As Julie Oreinger says in her elegant and perceptive introduction, the book is obsessed with the pairing of beauty and death.  There is a conversation between the central character, who loses his wife on a honeymoon trip to Italy, and a professor about the different treatment of death in Italian Catholicism and Germanic religions of the tenth century that I found totally illuminating.  

The translation by Lew Rix reads beautifully.

In the interest of full disclosure, I was given this book by the Publisher, The New York Review of Books. 

ANTAL SZERB (1901–1945) was born in Budapest into a middle-class family that had converted from Judaism to Catholicism. He studied German and English literature at the University of Budapest, receiving a PhD in 1924. Throughout the second half of the 1920s he lived in France, Italy, and England, where he worked on his first book, An Outline of English Literature (1929). In 1933 he was elected the president of the Hungarian Literary Academy and the next year published his History of Hungarian Literature, called by John Lukacs, “not only a classic but a sensitive and profound description of . . . the Magyar mind.” It was followed in 1941 by a three-volume History of World Literature. In addition to his critical writings, Szerb produced produced many works of translation, and published newspaper articles, essays, reviews, short stories, and novels, of which The Pendragon Legend (1934), Love in a Bottle, (1935), The Third Tower (written in 1936), Journey by Moonlight (1937), Oliver VII (1937), and The Queen’s Necklace (1943) have been translated into English. Having lost his university teaching position as a result of Hungary’s anti-Semitic laws, Szerb was sent to a labor camp, where it is believed he was beaten to death. He was survived by his wife, Klára Bálint, who died in 1992.   From the publisher New York Review of Books

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The Door by Magda Szabó (1987, translated from the Hungarian by Len Rix, 2005, awarded The Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize)

"at the center of this self-conscious narrative of a clash between high and low cultures is a story of such savagery that it demands both silence and truth."  Ali Smith

The Door by Magda Szabó is almost an overpowering work, it almost seemed to bludgeon me into submission as I was driven to read on and on being drawn further and further into the story of the relationship of a professional writer, a woman of the upper class, and a woman she engages to help her with the household chores, Emerence.   The story takes place well after the terrible years of World War Two in Hungary but not so far away that  the memory those dark years does not overshadow much of daily life.  In one very powerful memory image we learn of a troop of Germans who machine gunned  a herd of cows.  We don't know why they did this but the pure mindless destruction and cruelty of it informs our experience of The Door.  Szabó is a true master of the small detail. 

The character of Emerence is something I find myself unable or unwilling to try to describe.  She is just a powerful almost chthonic woman.  She totally repudiates all religion.  She is capable of huge amounts of work.  She is a servant but she is far from servile.  There is a never ending struggle for power between the novelist, who narrates the story, and Emerence.  There is amazing use made of a dog, Viola, in the story.  Cats also play an important part in the life of Emerence.  As the story progresses we learn more and more about the mysterious past and life of Emerence.  Foodies will appreciate the many gastronomic refrences and we also sense we are in a place where not long ago just having enough food was a day to day issue for most Hungarians.

Emerence looks upon the work of the writer, as the novel nears the end she wins a big award, as little more than playing.  She only respects real work done with your hands.  She is close with a Lieutenant Colonel in the police, not as a romance, but we never really learn how this came to happen.  Terrible things happen in this novel, scenes of horrible squalor and pain.  Szabó makes us not just intellectualize this but feel it, smell it and experience  the pain brought down on all.  Sections are near to nausea inducing.  

There is much more in this wonderful novel than I can bring out here.  I am so glad I read this powerful book.  It kept me totally captivated wanting to know what will happen next.  It is very much a work about economics and class distinctions.  There are a lot of exciting events and interesting minor characters.  Emerence always refers to the writer's husband as, Tne Master.  We are being taken way back in Eastern European history and culture.

I hope to read more by Magda Szabó.  I would love to see the movie.  

Magda Szabó (1917–2007) was born into an old Protestant family in Debrecen, Hungary’s “Calvinist Rome,” in the midst of the great Hungarian plain. Szabó, whose father taught her to converse with him in Latin, German, English, and French, attended the University of Debrecen, studying Latin and Hungarian, and went on to work as a teacher throughout the German and  Soviet occupations of Hungary in 1944 and 1945. In 1947, she published two volumes of poetry, Bárány (The Lamb), and Vissza az emberig (Return to Man), for which she received the Baumgartner Prize in 1949. Under Communist rule, this early critical success became a liability, and Szabó turned to writing fiction: her first novel, Freskó (Fresco), came out  in 1958, followed closely by Az oz (The Fawn). In 1959 she won the József Attila Prize, after which she went on to write many more novels, among them Katalin utca (Katalin Street, 1969), Ókút (The Ancient Well, 1970), Régimódi történet (An Old-Fashioned Tale, 1971), and Az ajtó (The Door, 1987). Szabó also wrote verse for children, plays, short stories, and nonfiction, including a tribute to her husband, Tibor Szobotka, a writer and translator of Tolkien and Galsworthy who died in 1982. A member of the European Academy of Sciences and a warden of the Calvinist Theological Seminary in Debrecen, Magda Szabó died in the town in which she was born, a book in her hand. In 2017 NYRB Classics will publish Iza’s Ballad (1963).

Len Rix is a poet, critic, and former literature professor who has translated five books by Antal Szerb, including the novel Journey by Moonlight (available as an NYRB Classic) and, most recently, the travel memoir The Third Tower. In 2006 he was awarded the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize for his translation of The Door.

From webpage of The New York Review of Books

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Skylark by Dezso Kosztolanyi (1924, translated by Richard Aczel, 2010)

I wish to express my great thanks to Max u for the Amazon Gift Card that allowed me to read Skylark.

"Kosztolanyi does not seek his own face.  He continually lives through role and is close to classical decadence.  The dandy is the last flowering of heroism in our age of decline, says the great dandyologist Baudlieire.  Kosztolanyi is a classical dandy, strict and severe". By Peter Esterhazy in his introduction to Skylark.

Skylark by Dezso Kosztolanyi is set in a fictional small town, 1899, in the Austro-Hungarian Empire.  In the present day it would be in Serbia.   I have of late been getting more and more into the literature of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.  Writers like Stefan Zweig, Joseph Roth, Gregor von Rezzori,  Franz Kafka, and Hermann Broch are all on my read all I can list.  (Which means translated into English and available as an E Book.)  For sure Dezso Kosztolanyi belongs in this company.  Sadly it appears Skylark is his only work currently available for me to read.

My prepurchase research on Skylark gave me very high expectations for the novel, I was expecting a masterpiece and Kosztolanyi more than lived up to my hopes.  It focuses on a couple in their late fifties, married a very long time, whose lives center around their daughter, an only child, Skylark.  It took me a few chapters to feel the power of the novel but at midpoint I was very much overpowered by Skylark.  it is at least as good as it is claimed to be.

There is a much better post on Skylark than I could ever dream of writing by Deborah Eisenberg which you can read HERE.

The last few chapters of Skylark are just amazing.  The portrait of the thirty five year old marriage is beyond praise, the parental dynamics are brilliantly done.  The father worked as a civil servant all his working years and now does genealogy research as a hobby.  The day to day life in the small town is viscerally real.  The food in The Lord of Hungary restaurant made me wish I was a patron.  

I am so glad I read Skylark.

I am increasingly fascinated by the figure of the dandy in European literature and I found the comments of Peter Esterhazy in his well done introduction very interesting.

Dezső Kosztolányi (1885-1936) was born in Subotica, a provincial Austro-Hungarian city (located in present-day Serbia) that would serve as the model for the fictional town in which he later set several novels, including Skylark. His father was the headmaster of the local gymnasium, which he attended until he was expelled for insubordination. Kosztolányi spent three years studying Hungarian and German at the University of Budapest, but quit in 1906 to go into journalism. In 1908 he was among the first contributors to the legendary literary journal Nyugat; in 1910, the publication of his second collection of poems, The Complaints of a Poor Little Child, caused a literary sensation. Kosztolányi turned from poetry to fiction in the 1920s, when he wrote the novels Nero, the Bloody Poet (to which Thomas Mann contributed a preface); Skylark; and Anna Edès. An influential critic and, in 1931, the first president of the Hungarian PEN Club, Kosztolányi was also celebrated as the translator of such varied writers as Shakespeare, Lewis Carroll, Oscar Wilde, Verlaine, Baudelaire, Goethe, and Rilke, as well as for his anthology of Chinese and Japanese poetry. He was married to the actress Ilona Harmos and had one son.  From the webpage of The New York Review of Books

I have just formally begun a new permanent reading project, literature of the Austro-Humgarian Empire

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The Burning of the World - A Memoir of 1914 by Béla Zombory-Moldován(2014)

The Burning of the World-A Memoir of 1914 by Bela Zombory- Moldovan (1885 to 1967, Hungary), translated and very well introduced by his grandson, is a poetic memoir of a painter who was drafted from his care free life at 29 to fight the Russians in World War One.  His memoir went unpublished  for many years until his grandson translated it into English.  It ends in 1915, with the author living on for five more decades.  If might be a fragment of a larger work we just don't know.

The book is being marketed as an "undiscovered" classic.  Most of the times phrases like that are hyperbolic but in this case I think it is very accurate.  There is something about the old Austro-Hungarian Empire that draws me to it.  Maybe it represents to me a

wished for time of high respect for culture, tolerance and the reading life.  I know many great writers loved the Empire.

Béla Zombory-Moldován lets us see the very mixed bag that made up the officer's corp.  One colonel refused to allow his men to dig fox holes because he thought it showed cowardice to hide from the enemy in a hole. In one scene with layers of irony and pathos the author straps on his dress sword and says "Now the Russians will really be scared".  He stood up to a full barrage of heavy Russian cannon and nothing could be found of his body.  Béla Zombory-Moldován is severly wounded and gets a three month leave.  We are with him as he tours his beloved Budapest.  He often talks of his painting and we see a very peaceful kind man forced to be a killer by fools.   The scenes where he visits his parents are very moving.

I am very glad I read this book.  It is a valuable edition to WW I memoir literature.

From the webpage of The New York Review of Books, the publisher.

Béla Zombory-Moldován (1885–1967) was born in Munkács (now Mukachevo), in what was then the Kingdom of Hungary, part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. After graduating from the Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest, he established himself as a painter, illustrator, and graphic artist. Wounded in action in 1914 as a junior officer on the eastern front, he served the rest of the First World War in non-combatant duties. He was a successful painter, especially of portraits, during the interwar years, and was the principal of the Budapest School of Applied Arts from 1935 until his dismissal by the Communist regime in 1946. Out of official favor and artistic fashion in the postwar years, he devoted himself to the quiet landscapes in oils and watercolor that are his finest work. The writing of his recently discovered memoirs probably also dates from those years of seclusion.

BOOKS

• 

  The Burning of the World

  Recently discovered among private papers and published here for the first time in any language, this extraordinary reminiscence by a young artist, drafted into the bloody combat of the First World War, is a deeply moving addition to the literature of the terrible conflict that defined the shape of the twentieth century.
  
  

I was provided a review copy of this book.

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Casanova in Bolzano by Sandor Marai (1940, translated by George Szirtes)

Sandor Marai (1900 to 1990, Hungarian) is a great, long neglected writer.  Knopf has recently begun publishing English translations of his works.  There is some background data on him in my post on his powerful novel, Embers.  He is considered by many to be the greatest Hungarian writer.  I see him as in the tradition of great Austro-Hungarian writers like Joseph Roth, Stefan Zweig, and Gregor Von Rezzori. Like them he writers out of deep culture and can be partially seen as an elegist of a dying aristocracy.   

Casanova in Bolzano is Marai's very imaginative portrayal of Giacomo Girolamo Casanova (1725 to 1790) upon his release from an eight month prison sentence.  It reminded me of read long ago works by the Marquis de Sade.  Casanova is a great egoist, a figure of fascination and repulsion.  He moves equally well in the private chamber of a countess or in an alley with a prostitute.  Much of the work focuses Casanova's reflections on how he is seen, on the life he lives.  In a way he is almost a  "professional outcast", living from his reputation as a great seducer, a fabulous  lover.  Much of the story is set in Venice and the city itself is almost a character.  Marai does an excellant job of giving us a feel for Vienna, as seen through the eyes of Casanova.  Part of the narrative focuses on a Duke of Parma and his wife.

This is a very introspective, deeply realized work that I found fascinating.

          "Casanova, you would not last thirty minutes with me"

                 - Carmilla

I will continue reading Sandor Marai.

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Embers by Sandor Marai (1942)

 

My quick advance read research on Embers by Sandor Marai (1900 to 1989, born in Hungary, he emigrated to the USA in 1949 and died in obscurity in San Diego, California) described it as a "rediscovered" European classic, first translated in 2002 by Carol Brown Janeway.  I have lately been getting into writers from the area of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire so I decided to take a chance on Embers.  All the raves are right, it must be counted as a classic European work, according to many the best novel by a Hungarian writer.  Like Joseph Roth and Stefan Zweig, Marai's work is informed by a deep love for and understanding of the culture of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.  Like Roth and Zweig, he left his homeland when he no longer felt comfortable or safe their due to the political climate, in his case he did not wish to live under Communist rule. He can be seen as an elegiac writer.

An old very aristocratic retired general living with his 90 year old maid, once his wet nurse, in his castle in the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains receives word that his closest childhood friend, Konrad, has returned after 41 years, much of them in Malaysia.  He invites Konrad to dinner.  We learn of the boyhood friendship of the two men, enduring up until they are in their early thirties.  In the process we gain insight into the history of the Empire.  The General and his maid carefully plan the dinner.  I think this scene from the Hungarian made movie conveys the feeling of the event.

 The general is on the left, Konrad on the right.  The general has invited Konrad to try to unravel mysteries that have bothered him for decades, did Konrad have designs on murdering him during a hunting expedition so he could leave with his wife for the tropics.  (The hypersensitive may find racism in the description of Malaysian women but it is better to see this as a reflection of the attitude of western men.)  The conversation between the two men is largely a monolugue, an Inquistion by the General.  Through it a portrait of the marriage of the general emerges, his wife died 13 years prior to the dinner.  One of the things I love about this novel and other Austro-Hungarian works is the deep sense of history and respect for refined culture it embodies.  

Embers is a great novel, it truly belongs in the grand European canon.  There are maybe five of his novels, he wrote forty-six, currently translated.  None are much more than 250 pages and I for sure hope to be able to read them all.  

They Were Found Wanting by Miklos Banffy (1937, translated by Patrick Thrusfield and Katalin Banffy) Part Two of The Transylvania Trilogy

The Transylvania Trilogy by Count Miklos Banffy (1873 to 1950, Hungary) should be counted among the greatest literary works of the European tradition.  I find it hard to do an adequate blog post on it that will not seem like hyperbole.   At the start of the book the publisher includes quotations from reviews in major publications which compare the scope and power of Banffy's work to that of Tolstoy. My first reaction was, as yours should be also, skepticism but having completed part one of the trilogy, I see this as a very apt comparison.  It is as least as good as the works in the post Austro-Hungarian Empire tradition of great writers like Joseph Roth, Gregor Von Rozzi, and Stephan Zweig.  The scope of Banffy's work is greater than these writers and the cultural depth is on a par with Proust.  It is a brilliant portrayal of the declining years of The Austro-Hungarian Empire, some have suggested new to Bannffy   readers can visualize him as a Hungarian Trollope. 

The story of how The Transylvania Trilogy came to be written and then finally translated into English by the great scholar Patrick Thrusfield in collaboration with Bannfy's granddaughter, Katalin Banffy-Jolen is itself fascinating and is explained beautifully in the introduction and preface. The work fully deserves to be called "among the greatest rediscovered European masterworks of the twentieth century".  It was a best seller in Hungary in the 1930s but lost all readership, and many of its potential readers, in WW Two.   It was reissued in Hungarian (the communist regime banned it for years) in 1982 and became a best seller and now we have Arcadia Press to thank for the English translation of this trilogy.

I have previously posted on the first novel in the trilogy, They Were Counted.

The Writing on the Wall is very much a continuation of the family and romance stories begun in  They Were Counted.  There are numerous intrigues, scandals, and political happenings described at length. Banffy loved his home land of Transylvania and he brings its natural beauty and rich cultural traditions to the fore for us.  The descriptions of the meals made be wish I was a guest at one of the feasts.  This is a story of the gentry and their world.  The sex was surprisingly graphic.  

There is a lot of political history of Hungary from 1909 or so in this book, OK a really lot, but I found it edifying and Banffy was in a position to get his facts right.  

This trilogy belongs, in my opinion, in the second tier of great European novels and should be must reading for anyone seriously into Austro- Hungarian literature and history.

I will soon read the final work in the trilogy and will try to post in more detail then.

If you have read any of Banffy's work, please share your thoughts with us.

Mel u

 

They Were Counted by Miklos Banffy Part One of The Transylvania Trilogy (1934, translated by Patrick Thrusfield and Katalin Banffy-Jolen), 1999)

The Transylvania Trilogy by Count Miklos Banffy (1873 to 1950, Hungary) should be counted among the greatest literary works of the European tradition.  I find it hard to do an adequate blog post on it that will not seem like hyperbole.   At the start of the book the publisher includes quotations from reviews in major publications which compare the scope and power of Banffy's work to that of Tolstoy. My first reaction was, as yours should be also, skepticism but having completed part one of the trilogy, I see this as a very apt comparison.  It is as least as good as the works in the post Austro-Hungarian Empire tradition of great writers like Joseph Roth, Gregor Von Rozzi, and Stephan Zweig.  The scope of Banffy's work is greater than these writers and the cultural depth is on a par with Proust.  

The story of how The Transylvania Trilogy came to be written and then finally translated into English by the great scholar Patrick Thrusfield in collaboration with Bannfy's granddaughter, Katalin Banffy-Jolen is itself fascinating and is explained beautifully in the introduction and preface. The work fully deserves to be called "among the greatest rediscovered European masterworks of the twentieth century".  It was a best seller in Hungary in the 1930s but lost all readership, and many of its potential readers, in WW Two.   

They Were Counted is a very richly detailed book long enough to be generous with the book's readers and characters.  The trilogy is set from 1904 to 1914 in what was then Transylvania.  (The translators 

down play the use of the name The Transylvania Trilogy to avoid potential readers thinking it is about vampires.)  The principal characters are all old Nobel lineage Hungarian families.  The trilogy can be seen as a brilliant portrayal of a society in a decadent close.  It gives us a grand look at the life of Hungarian aristocrats.  Banffy centers the narrative on two cousins.  Life in elite military regiments, angling for rich brides and toadying up to wealthy old relatives are important activities.  Of course there is a star crossed romance with a married woman.  I was surprised by how sexually explicit parts of the book were. Gambling and the code of honor plays a big role in the lives of the young men.   Banffy does a very good job of letting us see into the mindset of the gambler and his role in Hungarian society.

Bannfy clearly loved Transylvania and we can see that in his many lyrical descriptions of the beauty of the country.  I gained a lot of knowledge of Hungarian politics and the economics of the society from this book.  There are great descriptions of banquets, social events and there is an Upstairs, Down Stairs flavor as Bannfy deals with the servants.  There is a simply amazing segment concerning a maid turned out of the great house when it is discovered she is pregnant.  They Were Counted is full of wonderful set pieces and small details.  I loved the segment where a society lady goes to a money lender to use her pearls to obtain a loan to pay the gambling debt of her lover.  It was so brilliant that I gasped aloud as I read it. 

The trilogy is over 1500 pages.  I have already started book two.  This is epic historical fiction on a grand scale fully the equal of a book covering similar people and much the same time period in England, Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End.    One society triumphed and the other collapsed. 

The book can also be seen as a study in the European dandy, a figure I am coming to see as of great cultural import in the period.

The Transylvania Trilogy needs to be on the too be read list of anyone into European fiction.  It will take a while to read but upon completion I will be hoping to reread it in 2016 at the latest.

Family Castle.

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The trilogy, which was actually out of print even in Hungarian until 1980, was published by Arcadia Books, Britain's leading publisher of works in translation.  They Were Counted won the Weidenfeld Prize for translation, presented by Umberto Eco.  

http://arcadiabooks.co.uk/