Miklós Györffy

Family Fortunes

 

Balázs Györe's (1951) Father of the Dead is also pure remembrance. It is in fact a single, tormented solilogui in which the author evokes or rather wrestles with the memory of his father. Györe's father was a highly educated man, embittered, introverted, who had lived a joyless life. He had suffered devastating disappointments in his youth. Disappointed in the one great love of his life, he lost his job in 1948, the Year of Change when the Communists took over. His manhood years during the Kádár Era were monotonous, uneventful, spent with his wife in toiling for survival in much the same way as that of the parents of Júlia Lángh. The last decades of his life were spent in permanent ill-health, reduced to being almost a living corpse in the end, first confined to his apartment, and finally to his sickbed. He was an epileptic, underwent brain surgery several times and died of prostate cancer at the age of 80. Before his retirement he had been a librarian and had written a host of studies on librarianship, documentation and information theory. Books were the meaning of his life; he created a fine private library of his own and appeared to read all the time. He was also a passionate music lover, an admirer first and foremost of Bartók. He felt as if Bartók had been something like an alter ego to him. And he wanted to be a creative artist, a writer himself. "He was brilliantly gifted," his son wrote after his death. "He could have been a terrific essayist (...) He was well versed in world literature. All styles. Could this have been one of the obstacles? Did he have too much to say? It seemed as if the overabundance of things he had to say had stopped him from speaking; as if because of all those things he had to say he never had a message of his own, and his own alone. (...) He did not dare or did not want to read himself, only books. (...) He was afraid of his own subjects."
Whether for this or some other reason, Györe's father (referred to as "my father" throughout the book) became a bitter, disillusioned man - or at least so he seemed to his son. His marriage was a failure, and he had no relationship worth mentioning with his only son. They had nothing to say to each other. They were incapable of being a family. They were unable to love each other. The atmosphere between them was chilly. And none of them revolted against it. All three were living dead. And mother and son stayed that even after the father's death. The father had been "the father of the dead". (The title also refers to the father's death, symbolcally, on All Saints' Day, the "Day of the Dead". "Day of the Dead" and "father of the dead" sound almost the same in Hungarian; the difference is a single character.) The pun does not exactly befit the grave ascetic tone of the text.

Endre Kukorelly's novel Fairy Valley (reviewed in HQ 172) comes to mind. That book also struggles with the memory of an inward turning father with a ruined life, incapable of relating to his son. The "father problem" is one of the major themes of contemporary Hungarian fiction. Györe's is one of the saddest and most disquieting variations on that theme. It is somewhat like Péter Esterházy's Revised Edition. After his death, something important comes to light about the father: he had secretly kept a diary in his old age, after he had turned sixty. The diary was found after his death.
It is hard to say if Györe, who has eight volumes of fiction behind him, would have written a book about his father if that secret had not come to light. In any case, he constructs his novel as if he would have done so anyway, or more exactly, he is doing so, as a task that sorrow and remembrance has laid upon him. It is precisely in the middle of the slim volume that the diaries are being "discovered". "I might have written a nice little book about my father. A fine, moving book. I might have written a sad book if the diaries had not been found. But they were found. (...) Do the diaries change everything? (...) Has reading the diaries changed the image of my father in me and my mother? Did he become a different man? A different father and husband? Or has he changed our lives? Have we become different? (...) What is one to make of the past fifty years? It is impossible to start everything all over again!"
Györe's soliloqui is full of questions. It consists of short, simple sentences, often two or three in a single line, all ending in question marks. "Man in fact is nothing but a question," the son quotes from the diary of his father. Does he put his questions to himself or the dead father? It is almost irrelevant since there are no answers anyway. What is in the diaries? What is it that overwrites the far from peaceful father-image of the son? First and foremost it is the very fact that he had kept a secret. True, he may have had other secrets as well, for sometimes he simply disappeared from home, though probably only because he wanted to be alone.
Keeping a diary is an obvious manifestation of the desire to write, a yearning suppressed for years, breaking to the surface. There is something embarrassing and sad about it: a man in his old age yields to the passion that has dominated him all his life. And of course that matter of the diaries is also disquieting. It is full of things he never spoke about either to his son or his wife: memories, thoughts, desires, pornography even. The son quotes a few details but not too many. It is not his purpose to let the diaries speak instead of himself. He is preoccupied not only with the father-image but with his own self too; he wants to know if, by finally confronting the father and having an imaginary dialogue with him, there is anything he can find out about himself.

 

Miklós Györffy
reviews new fiction for this journal.