Zsolt Láng

Homing In

 

Endre Karátson: Otthonok (Homes), 2 vols. Jelenkor Kiadó, Pécs, 2007, 312 & 329 pp. • Gábor Vida: Nem szabad és nem királyi (Unfree and Unroyal). Budapest, Magvető, 2007, 316 pp. • Dezső Tandori: A komplett tandori—komplett eZ? (A complete tandori—completely nutZ?). Budapest, Palatinus Kiadó, 202 pp.

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The personal and family lamentations (his younger brother's tragic death, the loss of other family members and friends) are joined with those caused by historical cataclysms, harrowing incidents of war and revolution. "I was racked by sobbing, and I didn't care that people were watching. Others were also weeping. It was a joyfully painful experience that made one forget all else" (that was in late October 1956, at the height of the Revolution). Mournful weeping mixes with happiness, the angry with lethargy, the anguished with liberation, the justified with the inexplicable. And again and again we return to a lament for Nicole from 1967: "It self-evidently stands to reason that I love her; the two of us belong together, and the turmoil of the last five years have only confirmed that."

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There is a short story by Borges, "St Mark's Gospel", in which the protagonist reads from the Bible to his visitors, simple villagers who in the end call him Christ and, to fulfil his fate, nail him to a cross. The first in this collection of short stories by Gábor Vida, "Rise Up and Walk!", likewise settles the fate of a figure who turns up by chance and is obliged to play a part (and die) in a role that others have assigned to him. (See pp. 45-52 of this issue.) That reference to Borges is not accidental; nor is that to García Márquez in another context. The pace of the story-telling, the magical link between cause and effect, the exoticism rooted in that magical connection, the attraction to a more archaic language and a slower-moving tempo-all offer parallels.

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Fragment for Hamlet, the collection of poems that Dezső Tandori came out with in 1968, was a turning point, or rather it later became one of the key reference points marking change. So what was new in Tandori? The wholeness and responsiveness with which he looked on the trinity of life, literature and work. He stripped this threeway relationship down to basics, analysed those elements and put them back together again: the world's poetic unity is restored even if there can be no ultimate answer.

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Zsolt Láng
is a native of Transylvania. He works as an editor at the Hungarian-language literary journal Látó in Marosvásárhely (Târgu Mures), Romania. His books include four volumes of fiction and collections of essays and autobiographical pieces.