Tranquility by Attila Bartis,
translated by Imre Goldstein
Archipelago, 325 pp., $15
In this startling novel, the first of Hungarian writer Attila Bartis's three books to appear in English, it's often hard to know exactly what's happening. Effects precede and obliterate their causes, and the weightiest facts are buried beneath the rubble of incident.
The book begins:
The funeral was at eleven in the morning on Saturday, though I would have liked to have waited a few more days, in case Eszter showed up, but they wouldn't continue with the refrigeration, not even for extra payment. The woman in the office quoted some new regulation and then asked why not cremate the body; it would be cheaper and much more practical since I could pick a time convenient for everybody in the family, to which I replied that I would not incinerate my mother, let the funeral be on Saturday, and I paid in advance for the three days of storage; she gave me a receipt, entered casket number 704-Saturday-Kerepesi-cemetery into the delivery log, and then put some papers before me, showing with a ballpoint pen where to sign.
And so present right from the start is the sneaky, half-teasing indirection that characterizes the entire novel. The narrator mentions the most crucial events in passing, then returns to them via circuitous routes full of speculative tangents, remembered dreams, stories within stories, and purposely disorienting chronological lurches, often keeping the reader in the dark until that long-delayed spark of recognition, a moment of pleasure mixed with and heightened by relief. No event is as big as the death of the narrator's mother, and the novel takes nearly 300 pages to come home to its opening paragraph.
This is a book that asks for our patience. And met with prose that's both aggressive and nimble--Beckett and Bernhard seem to be touchstones--and a psychodrama that's both overblown and precisely anatomized (as well as very funny), we're happy to grant it.
The story takes place, we eventually gather, in and around Budapest between 1975 or so and 1989, when Soviet troops withdrew from the country after a more than 40-year presence. The "goulash communism" that reigned during this period has sometimes been presented as a more liberal and forgiving--a soupier--kind than others, but Bartis's Hungary is bleak and brutal. Self-amputated cripples claim train stations as their own; half-naked gypsy children run begging alongside cars; a drunk whore pours vodka down the throat of a dead crow, then whacks it against a street curb and screams, "Rebeka is flying! Rebeka is flying! and the sidewalk was all bloody because the bird's head came halfway off the body."
Everything is stained with all manner of corruption, both casual and official. And while lying, cheating, bullying, blackmail, and bribery seep into all aspects of society, the focus here is their effect on art and on family, which for the Wéer family is inextricable: Narrator Andor Wéer is a fiction writer, his twin sister is a violin virtuoso who has escaped to America to pursue her career in greater freedom, and his mother is a well-known professional actress--until, that is, a party official threatens to end her career unless she convinces her daughter to return to Hungary. When her daughter refuses, not only is the official's threat made good but mother disowns daughter, holds a ceremonial funeral service, and withdraws into her house, where she sequesters herself for the last 14 years of her life.
Andor becomes his mother's caretaker (his father has long since disappeared and most likely been murdered) and mines their relationship for material to use in his fiction, which he leaves out for her to read. He authors postcards to his mother in his sister's name and keeps her sealed responses in a locked drawer. He rarely leaves home except for the occasional one-night stand, after which follows the predictable accompanying emptiness.
The first half of the novel darts from untender mother-son encounters (their shouting fits match and often exceed anything from Portnoy's Complaint) to vignettes from Andor's childhood when he and his sister were close (some of the most delicate and moving passages in the book) to an episode a week or so before his mother's death in which he takes a train to give a reading in the countryside. He is lost--and so are we--in a desolate, Oedipal, sadomasochistic, communistic maze.
The second half offers a way out. First, Andor meets a woman, the Eszter of the first paragraph, a librarian who is in her own way as troubled and desperate as he is. They have sex, and it is transcendent: "Then the walls trembled, the entire socialist realism environment along with the two beer mugs and a full ashtray, was shaken to its foundations, and then Eszter fell forward on the table."
Soon after they meet, Eszter reads Andor's fiction, demands that he try to publish it, becomes his amanuensis, and helps him prepare a collection of short stories. Thus begins a tale of love and first authorship--which for Andor seem interdependent, sometimes to the point of confusion. Once, after Andor has cheated on Eszter with his editor, Eszter screams, "Get the hell out of my life, you writer!" He does not, and it seems only appropriate that the first thing he does when his book is accepted for publication is propose marriage.
But Bartis won't let Andor off the hook that easily. The lovers deceive, betray, and otherwise abuse one another in ways that seem demented and yet somehow sweet, as if violence and neglect were the truest expressions of love. Their relationship jerks back and forth between emotional extremes, and finally crumbles and dissolves.
"Get out of my house," Andor's mother screams at him late in the novel.
"I'd be glad to," Andor answers, "but then you'll starve to death. You can't even turn on the faucet without me, Mother."
To which his mother responds: "My heart . . . my heart is aching!"
And Andor: "Come off it, you've no heart. And neither do I. There is snot in place of our hearts."
This novel is full of terrible acts, and they are perpetrated, as often as not, against friends and family members. Characters are cruel, irrational, fickle, perverse. There is plenty of psychology here--the prose approaches stream-of-consciousness at points--but almost no exploration of motives. Why does everyone act like a child?
Because communism is infantilizing. This seems to be the suggestion behind Andor's Oedipal predicament, which sometimes shades into allegory. (His mother dies, for example, just as the Soviets begin to leave the country.) It's the Soviets who have plucked out all these Hungarian hearts and replaced them with snot!
But Bartis is too subtle a writer to offer communism as the sole force behind all of the awfulness, and even as the Soviets roll their tanks out of the country, Andor overhears a man express a familiar sentiment: "If they're already here, and we got used to their faces, it would have been better if they stayed."
Andrew Palmer is a writer in New York.