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Skylark

Dezső Kosztolányi,

Richard Aczel (Translator)

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Aug 20, 2017 Stil de scriitor rated it really liked it · review of another edition

http://stildescriitor.ro/blog/2017/09... ...more

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Dec 26, 2019 Tony rated it really liked it

Shelves: novels, setting-europe

I'm not really sure who the contemporary audience is for this 1920s Hungarian novel about a week in late 1899 in the provincial town of Sárszeg(a fictional version of present-day Subotica, now in Serbia) -- but it's an oddly compelling book. The basics of it are very straightforward -- retired 60-year-old archivist ÁkosVajkay and his wife live in a modest house with their 35-year-old unmarried daughter. Their daily routine is essentially a drab purgatory of domestic routine and exactly zero plea I'm not really sure who the contemporary audience is for this 1920s Hungarian novel about a week in late 1899 in the provincial town of Sárszeg(a fictional version of present-day Subotica, now in Serbia) -- but it's an oddly compelling book. The basics of it are very straightforward -- retired 60-year-old archivist ÁkosVajkay and his wife live in a modest house with their 35-year-old unmarried daughter. Their daily routine is essentially a drab purgatory of domestic routine and exactly zero pleasures. When their daughter (the title character) goes off to the country for a week for the first time in years, what will happen?

The metamorphosis from decaying, isolated, misanthropic, homebodies to a theater-going, restaurant-dining, socializing couple is a joyful transformation. A good part of the wonder comes from the vast array of personalities that populate the town, and how it becomes apparent that the parents did at one point have a broad social circle and life. Kostolanyi grew up in Subotica, and one has to believe that he drew upon real places and people for much of what he describes. It all comes to a crescendo with an epic Thursday night debauch of liquor, cards, cigars, and fellowship. All of which makes the concealment and reversion to isolation especially heartbreaking when the daughter returns the next evening.

I'm sure those with a fine sense of central-European history could draw a lot more from the book. For example, it can't be an accident that a book written after the devastation of World War I is set in the final months of the previous century. Similarly, the father's profession was bound up in genealogy and heraldry of great families, all of which would come to mean precisely nothing in the modern world the author lived in. The book would also be interesting to view through a feminist lens -- although the father's name is used repeatedly, the mother's name is mentioned just once or twice and otherwise she is "Mother." There's a bit to be unpacked about daughter's physical ugliness and spinsterhood, and how that plays into the family dynamics. On the whole a very melancholy and elegiac read. ...more

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