by Douglas Messerli
Miklós Vámos The Book of the
Fathers, translated from the Hungarian by Peter Sherwood (New York: Other
Press, 2009)
Miklós Vámos' popular Hungarian fiction is a grand picaresque spanning
thirteen generations of the Csillag-Sternovsky-Stern family, tracing its roots
through the last 300 years of Hungarian history. As Vámos himself makes clear
in his Afterword, that history is not a pretty one, revealing that the
Hungarian people have seldom been on the winning side of a battle, and the
Csillag-Sternovsky-Stern family, whose names represent the Hungarian, Polish,
and German equivalents of "Star," suffer the fate of their homeland.
The fiction begins in the village of Kos in a territory of Hungary regularly attacked by both the Kuruc forces (vagabond guerrillas against the Habsburgs) and the Labanc (Austrian collaborators and reactionaries). The people in between these two groups are killed, their homes and businesses destroyed.
When Kornél Csillag's family is attacked they hide, with other villagers, successfully in a cave; but when the marauders temporarily retreat some are lured outside, and when they return they are followed, the cave bombarded. Everyone within, except for the young 4-year-old Kornél, are slaughtered. He survives only by accident.
We soon find out, however,
that Kornél, a born storyteller, has other powers that are handed down by birth
to the first-born sons, the ability to know the family's past without being
told and, in some instances, even to see hazily into the future.
These powers often provide
great comprehension and talents—Bálant Sternovsky, Kornél's son, for example,
knows hundreds of Hungarian tunes and sings them beautifully without any
musical training—but it does not necessarily help the family to survive.
Bálant, as almost every first-born son, meets an untimely and violent death;
and those who do not, often end life bitterly.
The 4th generation, that of
Richard Stern, is one of the most successful. Richard, who falls in love with a
Jewish girl, converts to Judaism and develops a successful wine business with
his wife's family. His end, however, begins a long period of hateful prejudice
and religious persecution which, even though the Stern-Csillag's no longer
practice the religion, destroys entire generations in World Wars I and II, and
leads the prison camp survivor Balázs Csillag to declare himself a Roman
Catholic. Balázs lives a long life, but remains bitterly empty and lonely,
leaving his son to try to comprehend why his father was such a cold and
forbidding man.
By the end of the family
history, the Csillags no longer know their own pasts, and the magic powers of
memory and foretelling have disappeared. Balázs destroys the two volumes of The Book of the Fathers. It seems almost
an accident that Henryk Csillag-Stern has a child, and we are not certain that
the final Csillag, Konrad, will even marry; but he does, by fiction's end,
begin to show amazing linguistic powers that may link him with the illustrious
personages of his past.
Each of the generations is
given large chapters in which they and their families play out, in ordinary and
amazing ways, their personalities against the backdrop of Hungarian landscape
and history. And there is no question that Vámos is a man of great literary
talent. Yet it is the very generational structure he his imposed upon his work
that brings with it a kind of flacidness defeating some of the dramatic
narratives he relates. After a while, not only do we know the patterns—birth,
short or long life, sudden death—but we lose interest in family members, just
as they seem to lose interest in themselves. That is not say there are not
brilliant moments throughout, and this reader, at least, was not at all
exhausted by the 466 pages of the text. But one might have longed for more
radically stylistic differences, more variance of the narrative method.
Vámos is clearly one of the
many talented contemporary Hungarian fiction writers, ranging from the highly
postmodern twists of plot of the works of Péter Esterházy, to the metaphysical
constructs of László Kraszhahorkai, to the intensely personal and often quirky
narratives of Péter Nádas and the quasi-autobiographical speculations of Imre
Kertész. All of these writers are significant; my only wish for Vámos' The Book of the Fathers is that he might
have whipped some of the wondrously personal mysteries of Kraszhahorkai and
Nádas into his towering soufflé.
Los Angeles, March 23, 2010
Reprinted from EXPLORINGfictions (March 2010).
