judith sollosy
 

Special Feature: Hungarian fiction, a preface

One of the best things about American literature is its diversity, and it is the same with contemporary Hungarian literature.  Though the writers included in this issue of The Chattahoochee Review are all Hungarian and have been on the scene, for some time at least, simultaneously (István Örkény died in 1979, and Sándor Tar in 2005), they are refreshingly and revealingly different from each other.  They are Hungarian by virtue of  birth, and they are Hungarian by virtue of their lives, for they have all lived through a totalitarian regime and are now living in a nascent democracy, while their parents or grandparents may have been subjects of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy.  They have, accordingly, all learned to write under fire in a hostile environment.  They have learned to use language and literature in subtle and intricate ways, and there is always more to their works than what first meets the eye. They are all intimately – possibly disconcertingly – familiar with what the English poet and translator George Szirtes has recently called “the subtler darker half-tones of life”. They are revolutionaries, each and every one of them, for they are all on the side of normalcy and against anything that is not fit for human consumption, as people would ironically put it in Hungary.  Also, as revolutionaries, they mean what they say and wear the courage of their convictions on their lapels.

Not surprisingly, their presence is not only literary, but electrifying as well.  They have all made a difference in how modern Hungarians see themselves.  This is true for all of them, down to the last man.  By virtue of their talent, individual vision, world view, and temperament, they are unique.  

István Örkény (1919-1975), who wrote the drama Catsplay and who was the son of a highly respected bourgeois chemist and pharmacist in Budapest, is the master of a special brand of the grotesque less directly political than Kafka.  His one minute stories, written over a lifetime, including “Perpetuum Mobile” and “Embarras de Richesses”, have become common currency in Hungary, and deserve no less at the hands of the English speaking public.
 
Ervin Lázár (b. 1936) is wildly popular in his native country thanks to his children’s books.  He comes of poor parents and spent his summers in a small village in the back of beyond.  These summers inspired him to write a collection of stories, three of which are included in this issue, and each of which, such as “The Blacksmith” are a magical combination of folklore and surrealism. They bring the work of Isabelle Allende  and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, to mind.  

Sándor Tar (1941-2005), who lived a blue collar existence in a provincial town in southern Hungary, was concerned throughout his career with the lives of the poorest of the poor around him.  But as he wrote about them one fact stood out – that they were human beings – and one thing was clear from the first sentence onward: that Tar was a superb master of classical prose and the creation of atmosphere.  A seeming paradox, but his style and sharp eye brings Marcel Proust to mind.

Lajos Parti Nagy (b. 1953), the outrageously popular poet, writer, and dramatist, also hails from rural Hungary.  His acquaintance with the proletariats of his country and his fascination with their often low but always inventive language, combined with his incisive understanding of the contradictions and painful humor inherent in totalitarianism and “goulash communism”, have made him a pre-eminent, post-modernist whose only rival, in Hungary, at any rate, is the aristocratic Péter Esterházy.

Kornis Mihály (b. 1949), the quintessential big-city, middle-class Jew, first gained popularity as a playwright and short story writer. But with its focus on the difficulties the grown-up writer faces when attempting to recapture the admittedly impressionistic episodes of his own life as a boy in the fifties, his Daybook has also made him into a respected novelist and the pioneer of post-modern existentialism that Albert Camus would have admired.

What are we to make of all this?  That invariably, gifted writers are never of just one place or of one time?  That, willy-nilly, they are part of the mainstream of literature, if we define literature as the conversation between important works?  Yes. Ultimately, that seems to be the “message.”