Book review of Lázár

European literary circles are now abuzz with another attempt to narrate Hungary’s turbulent century through three generations. This time the medium is not cinema but a sprawling family novel. Nelio Biedermann’s Lázár begins in the fading years of the Habsburg monarchy and ends in the aftermath of the Soviet crushing of the Hungarian uprising in 1956. The novelist, just 22, is even younger than Pálfi was. The book has already been compared to the great European family sagas, including Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks.

The novel opens at the turn of the 20th century in a mansion bordered by a forest. The estate’s owner, Sandor Lázár, watches the birth of his son with horror because of the strikingly different skin of the baby. The setting promises a gothic drama wrapped in mystery.

But Biedermann spends nearly 70 pages tracing the intricate emotional and sexual entanglements of the family. Sandor conducts an affair with a lowly married factory worker. His wife, the baroness Maria, seeks intimacy elsewhere, first with a horseman and later with the tutor of her children. Their daughter Ilona develops an obsession with the same tutor and, upon discovering his attachment to her mother, fabricates a molestation accusation that leads to his murder. On top of it, while the world believes Sandor to be the father of Lajos, only Maria knows otherwise.

The Lázár family inhabits a privileged rhythm of life, an entrenched monarchy that appears permanent. That the reader alone knows what’s lurking beyond the forest adds a layer of irony.

For nearly one-fourth of its length, the narrative crawls through a limited temporal frame. One can sense that the betrayals and lies are a signal to a larger decay, the final movements of a social order approaching extinction. But one can’t avoid sensing either that a tauter opening could have served the narrative better.

The novel gains momentum with the outbreak of the First World War and the disintegration of the Hapsburg empire. Private lives begin to intersect with public catastrophe, and a Hungarian landscape comes to reflect the turbulent decades Europe lived through in the first half of the twentieth century.

One of the telling episodes arrives at the end of the third chapter, when Lajos undergoes psychoanalysis with a doctor who once studied under Sigmund Freud in Vienna. The doctor flaunts his connection to Freud while admitting that he never really understood what Freud actually meant. The scene aptly captures a continent fascinated by modern ideas while remaining uncertain about their meaning or implications.

Biedermann’s penetrative vision tells us how fantasies turn into humiliations. Ilona, who once found men in blood-soaked military uniforms irresistibly attractive, later finds herself being strip-searched by SS officers. The novel also pays homage to its predecessors. Maria’s death reminds you of Virginia Woolf who had stepped inside a river with stones in her cardigan. And Pista reads Marcel Proust when insomnia keeps him awake—Biedermann even reproduces the opening paragraphs of Proust’s famous novel.

The novel depicts both Nazi occupation and Soviet liberation without ideological simplification. In an unforgettable scene, Soviet troops arrive at the Lazar estate demanding a woman for the soldiers. The family silently offers up a maid. In a few devastating paragraphs, the novel exposes the persistence of class privilege even at moments when history appears to have levelled all distinctions.

The communist decades that follow are portrayed with equal sharpness. The family’s property is nationalised. Ilona emigrates to America. Lajos places a copy of The Communist Manifesto near the door in the hope that visiting officials will leave him alone. Naturally, it does not save him. When he telephones his sister overseas, he becomes irritated by the astronomical cost of the international call and the wastefulness of spending money listening to her howl.

The patterns of desire established in the opening chapters continue through subsequent generations. It becomes more direct with passing years. Lajos embarks on an affair, partly to “validate his masculinity” after a distance from his wife following childbirth. Decades later, forced into agricultural labour after leaving the mansion behind, Lajos’s children, Pista and Eva, spend freezing nights in a tiny barn. And then a night arrives when physical proximity with his sister awakens feelings in Pista. Clearly, the novel insists on exploring uncomfortable territory. Like Taxidermia, though in a much subtler register, Lázár examines desires that lie beyond accepted boundaries.

By the time the novel reaches the Hungarian uprising of 1956, the world of the Lázár mansion has vanished. The surviving members of the family drift toward Switzerland, carrying memories of a social order that no longer exists.

Lázár is not a perfect novel. Some sections are overextended, and some seem hurriedly summarised. The aspiration to crunch the decline of a civilisation across six decades in 300 pages arrives with a cost.

What still makes the novel impressive is its vision that epochal events enter human lives through private channels. Drawing partly on his own family history, Biedermann transforms the story of one Hungarian aristocratic clan into a reflection on the destruction of old Europe. The world that seemed eternal in its opening pages disappears by the end. The awareness about a civilisation that lost itself to its unbridled desires lends Lázár its power.

Beautifully translated by Jamie Bulloch in elegant and melancholic prose, Lázár may not justify the comparisons to Mann. But it justifies its own intent. It understands that history arrives through love affairs, jealousies, betrayals and misunderstandings. It knows that collapse of empires is experienced through bedrooms, dining tables and family secrets. And doomed are those who fail to hear history’s knock at their door.

Ashutosh Bhardwaj is an independent writer and journalist

Lázár
Nelio Biedermann
Translated by
Jamie Bulloch
Hachette
Pp 304, Rs 699