Ervin Lázár, who died last year at the age of seventy, is considered one of the great storytellers. Although born in Budapest, he spent his childhood in the small village of Alsó-Rácegrespuszta, which frequently provides the backdrop in his writing. His first book, a fairy tale for children published in 1964, was an immediate success, and he followed this up with numerous tales on which generations have been raised in Hungary. (A large number have been adapted for the stage, screen and radio and translated into many languages, though not as yet into English.) His finest "adult" work is the short story cycle Csillagmajor (Star Farmstead, 1996-see the extract on pp. 28-43 translated by Judy Sollosy), which conjures up the poor peasant world of his childhood on the southern plains of Transdanubia. It has been republished in an expanded version as part of an edition of his collected oeuvre.
Magic, miracles and mystery appear in this collection too, though Lázár does not borrow any figures or themes from his fables. Using the raw materials of his childhood, he creates a world that is leaner and more restrained. The individual stories feature precisely measured dialogue, overwhelming dramaturgy and snappy conclusions. Taken together, they form a kind of festoon bound by their setting and some recurrent characters. They are generally set in the period before the Second World War in an impoverished and remote village. The first novella, "The Giant", bears most affinity with his children's tales. From this, the reader is led to think that a child-narrator will tell the stories; however, this narrator recedes into the background and the narrative mode becomes impersonal-to the benefit of the texts themselves. With the exception of the first, the titles ("The Countess", "The Blacksmith", "The Woman in Blue", "The Knotweed") all refer to some everyday character or incident. Autobiographical but not nostalgic, the stories propose no moral either. Sometimes the narrative voice falters, but more often than not Lázár keeps his subject well in hand (however great the temptation towards sentimentality or whimsy tinged with pathos): memories come over as concise, succinct and condensed as possible. This sparse style is in keeping with the portrayal of the hard and merciless world of the poor peasantry, while giving everything a mysterious quality.

This is not the mysteriousness of the children's tale, even though Lázár has often been likened to the Latin American magical realists such as García Márquez, as well as to the more light-hearted magic of Czech literature, of which Hrabal is the standard-bearer (though I would contend that Ervin Lázár cannot really be likened to anyone). If we have to find something similar to Star Farmstead in contemporary Hungarian writing, it would be perhaps in another short story cycle, Sándor Tar's Our Street. (Tar also came from the poor peasantry, worked in a factory and also told the stories of his village.) Lázár is more gentle and fantastic, Tar more resigned, hardened and earthbound; still, both give impartial depictions of their characters, fallen yet hopeful even amid the worst of conditions.
One of the best stories in the collection is "The Blacksmith", in which the Devil arrives at the forge in Rácpácegres (the name Lázár consistently gives to the village of his birth) to have his horse shod. The smith does not have enough iron for the four horseshoes: he has to use his tools and all the iron in the village. So well does he do his work (with the enthusiastic help of all the villagers) that in the end the earth swallows up both the Devil and his horse because of the weight of all the iron in the horseshoes, and the people of the village celebrate with a ball. Only a few pages in length, this is masterful narrative, permeated by a mood that both alarms and soothes, in which characters and situations are adroitly created in a sentence or two. The gentle and (one might say) more angelic than demonic narrative mode makes plausible the reaction of the villagers, who, far from lamenting the loss of their iron, react to the development with extreme joy. Ervin Lázár shows the less familiar, more endearing, humorous, playful, angelic, enchanting side of his childhood: the people who, privations and poverty notwithstanding, are most curious about that which is good. The characters in Star Farmstead are responsive to good because so little of it befalls them, but the little that does draws their appreciation.