Generations A Through L By JANE SMILEY
By Miklos Vamos
Translated by Peter Sherwood
474 pp. Other Press. Paper, $15.95
Quick, name a Hungarian novelist. You get one point for Arthur Koestler and two points for the Nobel Prize winner Imre Kertesz, who had two books (out of 12) translated into English before he won the prize, and now has five. Take another three points for Peter Esterhazy, who has seven books in English, though he is better known in Europe than in the United States. Koestler was passionately political, as is Kertesz, whose most famous novel is about a teenage boy’s experience in several concentration camps during World War II. Eszterhazy is slangy and modernist. Now we have Miklos Vamos, who is almost exactly the same age as Esterhazy (both were born in 1950) and thoroughly cosmopolitan. He has written novels, screenplays, stories and essays, including two books composed in English, “The Xenophobe’s Guide to the Hungarians” and “United Steaks of America.” He has served as a correspondent for The Nation and The Washington Post. He lived in America for a period, teaching writing and screenwriting at Yale and City University of New York, so perhaps he is frustrated, as I am, that only one of his 14 novels has been published in the United States.
But “The Book of Fathers” is a good one to begin with, because it is graceful and alluring, a leisurely introduction to the last 300 years of Hungarian history and an often affecting depiction of the way individuals must appear and disappear, alive for a few years and then lost entirely, even to their own descendants.
As the novel opens, the Csillags arrive from Bavaria in the village of Kos. Grandpa Czuczor could not persuade his brother to return to “the depopulated villages of Hungary,” but he does bring his 3-year-old grandson, Kornel, along with his fortune and his canvas-covered notebook. He buries his fortune at the bottom of the garden (a servant is his only witness), and begins to write in Hungarian, although he is actually more fluent in German. Grandpa is a natural storyteller, and Kornel is eager to hear his family tales. It soon becomes clear that Kornel has extraordinary powers, which is a good thing, because he is only 4 when a band of mercenaries passes through, killing everyone but him, and burning the village to the ground. Although his legs are shattered by a falling rock, Kornel manages to survive with the help of a stray dog. The saga of the Csillags has begun.
Every Csillag (the name changes and changes back, but the heritage remains) manages to live long enough to sire a son, though not always long enough to see him. The 12 generations of the family share more nature than nurture — they like to write, they can often envision the activities of their precursors, and they sometimes foresee the future. Some of the fathers and sons are successful at business, others are musically talented even without instruction. What they can do only sometimes is save themselves. As the waves of history and warfare wash over Hungary (Vamos points out in an afterword that in the course of the 300 years of his narrative, Hungary never won a war), the Csillags rise and fall.
Vamos is evenhanded with the first 10 Csillags — each gets 35 pages, more or less. Kornel is succeeded by Balint, lonely possessor of a strange musical proficiency. Balint is succeeded by Istvan, who marries into a Jewish winemaking family and fascinates the local rabbi with his visions. He is followed by Richard, who is in prison when his chapter opens. When it closes, he has produced Otto, the first of six healthy sons. But just when it looks as though the Csillags (now “Sterns”) are about to become a dynasty, fate always intervenes. My favorite Csillag is Mendel Berda-Stern, born in 1844, whose desperate passion, conceived when he is but a toddler, is cardplaying — by the age of 18 he is making a fortune at casinos all over Europe. His passion for gambling is succeeded by a dedication to astrology and the tarot that seems linked to his sense of a vaster internal universe than he can quite understand. Every Csillag is active and busy, whether sinned against or sinning, but Vamos’s steady progress through the dramas that engulf them renders “The Book of Fathers” contemplative rather than tragic. In fact, there is a comic element to the twists and turns of the plot — just when the reader thinks all is lost (or, at least, something essential is lost), it turns up again. And this includes the family record, each father’s memories and speculations, recorded in successive folio volumes.
There is not so much of Arthur Koestler’s unblinking, let’s say hopeless, realism in the first nine chapters of “The Book of Fathers” as there is of leisurely pastoralism. Each chapter begins with a florid evocation of the landscape, and the landscape — sunlit sometimes, broad sometimes, but always undefended — is a leavening presence in the novel. Even Chapter 9, where the musical prodigy Nandor makes a career in the shadow of Enrico Caruso, doesn’t darken until the end, after Nandor has spent a lengthy period at a concentration camp that might be Auschwitz. He can still sing, and he does perform one last time, reflecting afterward, “If the great Caruso heard me now, perhaps he would offer a few words of praise.” It is Nandor who rediscovers the object that has given the Csillags their uncanny powers, and it is Nandor who decides to discard it.
As a result, the last hundred pages of “The Book of Fathers” are substantially different in tone from the first 360. The subject now is not what is strangely known, but all the many things that are not known and apparently cannot be known. Balazs Csillag, who has barely survived the Second World War, seems to his son, Vilmos, to be determined to forget the very things that Vilmos most wishes to learn — family history and history itself. In the last two sections, Vamos becomes political, but only in the sense that his survey of Hungarian history has stripped him of ideology; the Csillags suffer under a Hungarian marauder named Farkas Balassi no less than under the Communists. The hope that the last father, Henryk, holds for his 3-year-old son, Konrad, is based on his observation of Konrad’s powers of imagination. The reader, having read the family history, may feel the irony implicit in Henryk’s fatherly pride — if only he knew. But perhaps it’s better that he doesn’t.
“The Book of Fathers” is a serious novel that, while sometimes agonizing or even shocking, is never somber. Inevitably, its theme is that life goes on, and that every son is no less interesting than every father, that each generation’s search for wisdom is different but no less important or dramatic than the previous generation’s. Miklos Vamos’s literary skills are such that he can sustain the reader’s interest in each doomed generation (doomed by nature, if nothing else). His virtuoso portraits of his idiosyncratic characters are fully backed by his evocative portrayal of the world they live in and the history they live through. Note to Vamos’s publisher: More, please!
Jane Smiley’s books include “Ten Days in the Hills” and the recently published young adult novel “The Georges and the Jewels.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/25/books/review/Smiley-t.html?nl=books&emc=booksupdateema3
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