Celestial Harmonies : A Novel

Rating:
Summary: Man, God and Homeland
Review: I picked this novel up after reading the LA times book review. I was not disappointed; the book is sweeping in its scope without losing minute focus on the actions of individual men. The first portion of the book is devoid of a central character; only family relations exist this early in the story. Esterhazy tears down the walls of Hungarian society and allows the reader to fly over and inspect the scene for himself. Like God himself the reader is privy to all of actions of Peter's countrymen. The scene, at times, is both beautiful and appalling and leaves the reader aware of the continuity of the past and present, aware of how we all are "Fathers" "Mothers" "Sisters" and "Brothers" of one form or another.
The second portion of the book is a loose biography of the Esterhazy family stretching from the early 20th century to the early 1960s. Throughout all of the degradations suffered by the family, the father refuses to give up his birthright due to a Count: his Humanism.
In order to fully appreciate this book it is essential to have an understanding of Hungarian History and a knack for deciphering opaque references. Every word was carefully chosen so it is necessary to pay close attention to what you are reading, this, at times, slows the rhythm and makes the book seem longer than its 842 pages. If you have the time and will power then pick up this novel

Rating:
Summary: 85% fat--lots of trimming needed to get to the marrow
Review: I tried Esterhazy's previous "Princess Hahn-Hahn" but the overly clever, self-infatuated style fatigued me. Eloquent desciptions of Budapest sustained about fifty pages, but what about the other couple hundred pages? Well, it's the same difficulty cubed here. This book's at least four times longer yet feels like ten times more cleverly engrossed in navel-gazing. Here, as the blurb tells you, he takes on the whole noble family from which he's descended. The first half, mixing up all of his ancestors as his father and his mother, could've been jettisoned completely. The first interesting scene came on page 449: between his grandfather and a Bela Kun-era communist functionary dismissing the grandfather's shrine to his brother as "nothing," brushing away in the name of bureaucracy all that was individual.

Still, for a more consistent version of this, read Ken Kalfus' recent novel The Commissariat of Enlightenment. I kept waiting for truly engrossing insights into the clash of ideology and the personal, but too few remained in the last half of the book, although to be fair it reads more easily than the first half.
Bits do glitter within a heap of fools' gold. The narrator's lunch treats made by his mom. Mr. Nussbaum's visit, a showdown with an officious waiter, a household raid by Soviet troops, the memory of an afternoon with uncle Roberto, the realization that a dictatorship equals intimidation and fear, with its executioners and victims on the sidelines. I chuckled when his family were labeled the lowest category"intellectuals plus class enemies. But moments like these are far too few. As the title line of my review indicates, this book should've been 150 pages.

Far too little of Hungary emerges in a distinctive manner. I'd check out Tibor Fischer's Under the Frog for a more powerful and 75% shorter narrative of the Stalinist period. Strange that Esterhazy's homeland sags so stultifyingly on these pages when they boast of having owned so much of it. Almost none of its beauty or limitlessness rises from these word-soaked chapters, upon which no editor's red pen seems to have alighted. The translation by Judith Sollosy--the dustjacket notes she's an espert in translation and head of the Hungarian publisher Corvina's English section--gives us at one point a Pope "Pious" (no pun, as much later we read "Pius,") and renders from Magyar what we read as a "bum wrap"--a great neologism, but not what the author meant, in context!

Finally, the borrowings from dozens of other writers make for--in theory--a great instance of interextuality. I added one star for effort. But this magpie approach--for example, lifting parts of Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes to bring the death of a twin brother of the narrator into the plot--dumbfounded me. If you want an intelligent longer read you're better going back to one of Esterhazy's inspirations, like The Magic Mountain, Ulysses, or even Beckett's 1950s three novels. These deliver modernism in its concentrated form. What Esterhazy delivers is diluted, bloated, and indigestible. Maybe the compressed nature of the Magyar original does justice to Esterhazy's overwhelming lists, musings, anecdotes, and endless random thoughts, but the English version left me exhausted and glad to be done with the task.

Rating:
Summary: Harmonious - with just a discordant note or two
Review: This will sound like literary heresy, but the first recommendation I would make to those considering reading this book is that they start with Part II, the author's autobiographical narrative, and then go back and try Part I.

Peter Esterhazy's "Celestial Harmonies" is an ambitious and unusual literary proposal that really consists of two complementary books within a single cover. In the first part Esterhazy tells the story of his aristocratic family through 371 numbered vignettes, some only a few lines long, others spanning several pages. In the second part Esterhazy looks at Hungary's troubled passage through the 20th century, showing how his family got its first taste of the troubles ahead with the advent of Bela Kun's communist regime in 1919, then enjoyed a brief return to aristocratic normalcy before the Soviet satellite regime of the late 1940s took away all of the family's land, posessions and power.

The problem with this book is the construction of the first half, and that's the reason for the recommendation I made above. At some point the first half becomes such rough going that I'm afraid many readers will not make it past the halfway point, and that would be a shame. Esterhazy's approach to the first half was to tell the family's story as ancedotes involving a score of family patriarchs. The anecdotes are not in chronological order but rather skip back in forth in time: in most cases no dates are given. Perhaps Esterhazy wanted to keep his novel from seeming like a history book but I'm afraid the actual effect of his approach will be to send readers scurrying to their bookshelves for an encyclopedia, as they try to look up a particular battle or Hungarian leader in order to put a given vignette in context. Many of the vignettes are insightful, and a few are hilarious, but as Esterhazy progresses through Part I they become more and more metaphorical, metaphysical, and often simply confounding.

For all that, the second half is a poignant memoir, one that reads smoothly, brilliantly evocative of life in communist Hungary and of the sufferings of those families with "inconvenient" surnames, those whose mere birth made them enemies of the state. The insights from the viewpoint of the author's grandfather, a Prime Minister of Hungary towards the end of the Empire, are most interesting, and then the viewpoint gradually shifts to the author's. Esterhazy touchingly shows us his father's struggle to adapt to life in a world where he'd gone from being the heir to one of Hungary's biggest fortunes, to having to live in a one-room dwelling with his family and work a series of menial jobs, the only ones the state allowed him to have. Near the end of the book the author recounts a childhood meal at an expensive restaurant in Budapest, a meal his family was only able to have through the agency of special food coupons for foreigners that they were given by a relation. Only by pretending to be German tourists could the family enter the restaurant and, for a short time, escape the mediocre surroundings they'd been consigned to. Tourists in their own nation - the scene brilliantly expresses the extent of the Esterhazy family's losses under Communism and the author's personal memoir is a worthwhile evocation of the loss many innocent Hungarian families suffered in the aftermath the Second World War.