The Marriage Contract by Honoré de Balzac (1835, a novel, a component of The Human Comedy)

My Posts on Balzac

The Marriage Contract begins when a wealthy twenty seven year old Parisian decides to give up his playboy ways to marry a beautiful Spanish woman.  The mother of the girl wants the marriage to insure her daughter will have a luxurious life style as her family fortunes are in decline.  I think I see the influence of Samuel Richardson in this, Balzac does refer to him several times in The Human Comedy.

In one chilling chapter the mother gives her daughter advise on how to manipulate her husband to do what ever she wants, with him never being aware.  Over the course of the marriage the wife is a serial adulteress but the man sees her as a perfect angel and wrecks his life trying to keep her happy.

I would classify this book as bordering on readable as a stand alone book, not just for those reading through the full comedy.

49/91

Two Twenty First Century Hungarian Short Stories - by Zsófia Bán and Miklós Vajda

"When There Were Only Animals" by Zsófia Bán (from Best European Fiction 2012

"Portrait of a Mother in an American Frame" by Miklos Vajda (from Best European Fiction 2013)

I have been reading a bit of literature from countries once in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, all over works from authors dead long ago.  One of the best resources for contemporary European short stories in translation into English is the Best of European Fiction series of anthologies.  I have on my E Reader the 2012, 2013, and 2015 editions so I decided to see what I could find.  There are lots and lots of stories that were written by authors from locations once in the Empire.  Today I will post briefly on the two Hungarian stories I found.  Both of the stories center on long ago still lingering issues the narrator had with their mother.

"When There Were Only Animals" by Zsófia Bán 

"When There Were Only Animals" is a very interesting story about narrators tangled relationship with mother and her attempts to discover the truth about old family mysteries.  The narrator is a marine biologist who spends much of her time in Antarctica studying penguins.  There are numerous" metaphorical threads, the unreliability of old maps, the frozen whiteness of Antartica, old photo albums and memories of old family events.

Zsófia Bán was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1957 and grew up in Brazil and Hungary. A writer, essayist, and critic of art and literature, she made her fiction debut in 2007 with Esti iskola [Night School: A Reader for Adults], followed by Amikor még csak az állatok éltek [When There Were Only Animals, 2012]. Her short stories have been widely anthologized, and her two books of fiction have both come out in German (Abendschule, 2012, Als nur die Tiere lebten, 2014, Suhrkamp, both translated by Terézia Mora). She lives and works in Budapest, where she is Associate Professor at Eötvös Loránd University. From banzsofia.neg

"Portrait of a Mother in an American Frame" by Miklos Vajda

"Portrait of a Mother in an American Frame" also focuses on the narrator's attempt to come to terms with his mother. It is more a memoir essay than a story.  The narrative unfolds during a very turbulent period in Hungarian Empire.  His mother was  from a very distinqushed family, very cultured.  I admit I loved it when the narrator talked about how his mother started him reading Balzac and Dickens in his youth.  We learn her history gradually as the story unravels.  The narration jumps around a lot but the narrator, with a very multicultural background but he moves to America and frames his view of his Pan-European mother through the lenses of his American experiences.

Mel u

"The Fortune Teller" by Joaquim Maria Macado de Assis (1885)

My Posts on Brazilian Literature

Joaquim Macado de Assis (1839 to 1908, Rio de Janeiro) is considered the first major Brazilian writer. I have previously posted on a couple of his short stories and was pleasantly surprised to find one of his stories in a forthcoming collection of short stories I was recently  given. Influenced by Balzac, his work is kind of a portrait of Second Empire society in Rio de Janeiro.  

"The Fortune Teller", translated by Issac Goldberg in 1929, is about a romantic triangle.  As the story opens Rita has just been to a fortune teller who told her that her lover Camillio will never leave her.  She is married to a very close friend of Camillo and he fears this  visit will get back to the husband. Camillo tells her fortune tellers just tell their clients what they want to hear, he scoffs at all forms of the then in rage spiritualism.  By accident he somehow winds up at the fortune teller and she tells him not to worry the husband will not find out about the affair.  To feel fully secure in this he goes to Rita's house (spoiler alert) and finds her husband has killed her.  He then shoots Camillo.

The "The Fortune Teller" turns on irony and the fun of seeing nasty rich people get their due.

If you have not yet read any Brazilian short stories, he is the writer you should start with.

Bio data on Joaquim Macado de Assis (complied from various sources)

 He was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1839 and died there in 1909.  He was a very productive writer in numerous genres, including the short story.   He had a great deal of literary influence in Brazil.   His father was a wall painter descended from slaves and his mother was a washer woman.    He was very lucky in that his parents were the servants of a wealthy Brazilian politician whose wife and brother in law became Assis's godparents.   Through desire and good luck he met people who taught him to read French and introduced him to the reading life.   He got a job as a tyopgrapher's assistant on a newspaper and soon began writing for the paper.  He also learned English.   Marrying into a family that did not approve of him because he was a mulatto, he got a government job and because of his high intelligence and self education began to rise up in the ranks.   He was a supporter of the Brazilian monarchy and on the establishment of the republic he began to write in a way that was seen as quite critical of Brazilian society.   He wrote several novels, over 200 short stories and a great deal of journalistic work.

You can download this and other older Brazilian short stories from Project Gutenburg 

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/21040?msg=welcome_stranger

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

Mel u

Survival in the Shadows - Seven Jews Hidden in Hitler's Berlin by Barbara Lovenheim (2003)

Not long ago I read and posted on a very interesting book, The Last Jews in Berlin by Leonard Gross.  It dealt in a very moving and detailed fashion with the lives of Jewish people who survived in Berlin during World War II inspite of the Naźi's determination to make the city free of all Jews.  Survival in the Shadows - Seven Jews Hidden in Hitler's Berlin by Barbara Lovenheim covers much of the same ground, focusing not on all the survivors so much as Gross did but on seven Jews.  Both books strongly make the point that all the surviving Jews had the help of Germans who knew they were risking their lives to assist them.  Some Germans hated Hitler and felt he was destroying Germany.  Others were paid in Marks or food, the search for food is ever present.  

Lovenheim's book focuses on seven people, from two families.   We see how sometimes they hid in apartments, sometimes in cellers and sometimes they passed as non- Jewish.  I really hated one character in the story, a beautiful Jewish woman who had turned in over three hundred Jews in hiding to the SS, for rewards.  As the story proceeds we see the growing American and RAF bombing raids on Berlin.  The Jews are terrified of the raids, sometimes with as many as a 1000 bombers, but they relished seeing the Germans being attacked and they sensed the end was coming for the Germans.  Lovenheim does a great job describing the terror of the bomb raids.  

Two of the seven, the young men .Jews worked for Seimens, with false identification papers.  The two boys who worked for Siemens did so before they went into hiding; they were recruited as slave laborers. But when Erich heard a rumor that Goebbels was planning to arrest all German slave laborers and send them to the camps, the group went into hiding.  

Siemens made heavy use of slave labor during WW II and was very much a pro-Nazi company. One of the best scenes in the books occurred right after the war when the two young men went back to Seimens and gave their once proud Nazi boss a severe beating but stopped short of killing him.  

(Inside a Seimens airplane parts factory in a concentration camp)

There is a lot of fascinating and exciting details in Lovenheim's great book.  She provides us with information on the post war history  of the Jews and those Germans who helped them.  The arrival of Russian troops meant liberation but they were raw undisciplined fighters who had to be treated with caution. In one wonderful scene, A Russian Jewish soldier nearly breaks down when he meets one of the Jewish men.  The Jews in hiding did not all fully understand the great depths of horror of the Holocaust.

Right after the war all Germans but a few die hard Nazis, said they never supported Hitler and always opposed his policies.  I loved it when one of the hiders said most Nazis were stupid and can be fooled with bluster and self confidence.  

It was great seeing the families moving to America and two young couples marrying. 

Survival in the Shadows - Seven Jews Hidden in Hitler's Berlin by Barbara Lovenheim is a welcome addition to Holocaust literature.  I recommend it highly.  

For background information on Lovenheim and her book, I refer you to her excellant wepage,

Barbaralovenheim.com

Mel u

The Commission in Lunacy by Honore de Balzac (1836, A Novella, A Component of The Human Comedy)

My Posts on Balzac

The Commission in Lunacy provided me with a look into a historical  question I had not previously pondered.  How did they treat controversies arising over claims that a person was allegedly not fit to manage own affairs in Paris in the 1830s.  Of course such cases normally only came up for government ruling among the rich where spouses, siblings, or potential heirs thought someone was handling their moneyed in an insane fashion.  The Commision in Lunacy takes us inside a case where the wife of a wealthy man is trying to get a court order declaring him insane so he can be stopped from giving large sums of money to a family he seems to have no connection with.  

Much of the enjoyment in this story is following the judge's deliberations, sitting in as he meets with those involved with the case. Of course Balzac does his masterful job of describing all involved and the settings for the story.

The Commision in Lunacy is worth reading as a stand alone work mostly for the time traveling aspects we savor in Balzac, for the descriptions, and for following the thoughts of the judge as the case unravels.

48/91

Mel u

"Ignored" by Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay. (1946, Translated from Bengali by Chhanda Chattopadhyay Bewtra)

                           

বিভূতিভূষণ বন্দ্যোপাধ্যায়

"Ignored" by Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, first published May 1946 and first translated into English in 2015, is a simple very moving story that lets us see how child brides were regarded in India, in the time just before The Partition.

A man hears someone at his door, it is a young girl of thirteen.  It is a bit shocking to our current sensibilities when we learn the man, a family member, can tell she is married from her clothing.  She calls him "Uncle" and he invites her into the household.  Everyone pretty much ignores her the uncle says to himself, why would anyone want to talk to her, she is the daughter of a blacksmith.  Feeling a bit of sympathy for her, as she sits on the floor playing with the edge of her sari, he gives her some perfumed oil for her hair.  

You can read this story at Parabaas.com, a great source for learning about the literature of the Indian Subcontinent.

Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay

Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay (1894–1950) wrote novels, short stories, travelogues, and detailed diaries, all in Bengali. His literary career began in 1921 with the publication of the short story ‘Upeksita’ in the magazine Prabasi. His first novel, Pather Panchali, was recognized as a landmark in Bengali fiction, and was adapted into an award-winning film by Satyajit Ray. Bibhutibhushan also wrote for children, and the novel Chander Pahar is considered a classic.  (From Penquinindia.com)

Mel u