The Best Books of 2018

In the order which I read them.

Mrs. Osmond.  John Banville.

This book takes off from the point that Henry James's Portrait of a Lady ended:  when Isabel Archer, now wife to Gilbert Osmond, is in England for the death of her cousin Ralph Touchett.  It takes a very confident and ambitious writer to extend a novel by Henry James, and John Banville is both.  Banville is not James, and it would probably be churlish to belabor that fact.  Instead, Banville gives us a 21st century take, revealing explicitly what James only suggests: the specific nature of Osmond's psychological sadism.   He also gives Isabel Archer a potent degree of agentivity, rescuing her from the passivity that bothers many readers of Portrait.  However, in some ways  her feminist strength and the female circumstances in which she is invited to live seem, if not anachronistic, perhaps a little blunt given the subtlety with which James has created her as a character.  Despite some quibbles, I recommend this to any James fan.

  

How to be Both.  Autumn.  Ali Smith.
I discovered Ali Smith this year and read these two books.  They are both stunning.  Smith is beautiful stylist (gorgeous sentences) as well as remarkably provocative at structuring novels that don't read much like anything you've read before.  Both have "plots," but it would be difficult to summarize them in any way that would do justice to the experience of reading one of her books.  She asks the reader to do a lot of the work of making sense of how the novel is constructed.  And to like her, you have to like this sort of thing.  Both are great.  Autumn is the first a planned quartet. 

Katalin Street. Magda Szabo.

Another, newly translated, novel by the great Hungarian novelist Magda Szabo.  This one concerns a group of people who live on Katalin Street in Buda and are displaced, first by World War II and then by the Soviets.  Melancholy and poignant.  I did a kind of companion blogpost based on a fortepan essay  here. 

A Long way from Home.  Peter Carey.

I love Peter Carey and the myriad ways he invents Australia.  This time the book is about a car race around the perimeter of Australia in 1954.  As husband and wife team Irene and Titch Bobs circumnavigate the continent, they learn a lot about their selves, their marriage, and the strange, dangerous and wonderful country they live in. 

The Only Story.  Julian Barnes. 
I also love Julian Barnes, and one of my favorites is The Sense of an Ending (2011).  This book is a kind of counterpart to the earlier one, as it records the story of a young man who falls in love with an older woman and who runs away with her to live together for many years.  If you have read The Sense of an Ending (which I have to say is the better book of the two) then you will know how they relate.  While this is not, to my mind, one of Barnes's very best, it is very good.  And very good Barnes is better than most of what I read.
                                                                    

 

The Counterlife.  Philip Roth.  Asymmetry.  Lisa Halliday. 
Philip Roth died in 2018.  For me, he was the greatest American writer of my lifetime.  I decided to read The Counterlife, one of his books I admired most and one which I had not read in several years.  I also read Lisa Halliday's Asymmetry, which is a book in some ways about and in response to Roth.  I wrote about both these books here.

The Garden of the Finzi-Continis.  Giorgio Bassani.
 Set in Ferrara during the years leading to World War II, this novel by the Italian writer Giorgio Bassani recounts the story of Jewish children and later adolescents in the years before World War II.  It centers around a young man, the narrator, who becomes friends with the fabulously wealthy Finzi-Contini family.  Although the families of the narrator and the Finzi-Continis share seats in the synagogue, there are class differences between them.  In the prologue we discover that almost none of the Finzi-Continis survived the war.  This rather astonishing book, published in 1962, examines with extreme subtlety the growing and waning  love affair between the Finzi-Contini daughter and the narrator, a relationship that is negotiated among class differences and the growing effects of the Racial Laws.  The movie was also wonderful.

History of Wolves.  Emily Fridlund.

A creepy but compulsively readable book about a young girl whose parents live on a failed commune in Minnesota.  Linda, the protagonist, comes to know a teacher who is accused of child pornography and a seemingly idyllic family who lives across the lake whose child she babysits.  No one, however, is who they seem to be.  And the resulting tension, particularly in relation to the family, mounts to an almost unbearable tragedy.  Short-listed for the Man-Booker Prize.  Also a debut novel.  

 Mrs. Engels.  Gavin McLeod.
I found this book this book on the long-list for the Booker Prize.  (Looking at prize long and sort lists is a good way to discover new novels.)  It's a fictional account of a real woman named Lizzie Burns who lived with Frederick Engels, first in Manchester, then London while he and Karl Marx were working together.  Burns was a worker in the Manchester cotton mills, functionally illiterate, but very intelligent.  Little is known of her or her sister Mary Burns, who was until her death Engel's lover.  Mary and Lizzie apparently helped Engels navigate the Manchester slums, an experience that led to The Condition of the Working Class in England.  It was interesting (and about something of which I knew almost nothing), and the character of Lizzie was well imagined.

The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony.  Roberto Calasso.
This book has been on my shelf for quite a long time.  Calasso has been called a "literary institution of one."  His books are wide-ranging explorations of cultural moments and traditions, such as Hindu mythology, Tiepelo, Kafka, Paris in the second half of the nineteenth century, Nabokov, Vedic sacrifices--or as in The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, Greek mythology.  Drawing on an extraordinary number of classical sources, Calasso reads the patterns of Greek mythology, putting various stories together and in perspective to identify broad concerns of the Greeks.  It is the stories of Greek mythology as you have never considered them.  Written in a lyric and allusive style, this book tantalizes the reader.  It is a book you have to fall into.

The Witch Elm.  Tana French.
On a completely different note.  Tana French is famous for her books about a Dublin Murder Squad.  These books are loosely related but all are police procedurals and are very compelling.  French not only constructs intricate plots, she also writes very nice prose.  The Witch Elm,  her latest, is a stand-alone.  Although it involves a murder, it is not narrated from the point of view of the police.  Rather, the narrator is a young man named Toby who has recently been victimized in a vicious robbery and who unwittingly finds himself in the middle of the a police enquiry initiated by the discovery of a body in a tree at his uncle's house, where he is currently recuperating.  Toby, who previously considered himself very "lucky" (lots of friends, nice looking, great family, good job) is now undergoing a psychological breakdown as he tries to reconstruct his life and his sense of self.  Plunged into the middle of this murder investigation, and not always trusting his own memory, he is jumpy, nervous, scattered and perhaps paranoid.  It's quite a tour-de-force, and a challenging but fascinating job for the reader to live in this consciousness.  Once I started it, I couldn't put it down.   you,  


#BestBooks2018

Did Magda Szabo Visit Katalin Street? A Fortepan Essay

Vizivarosi Budapest, 1953/  Photo Credit:  Fortepan:Poto:Nagy Gyula.  

Fortepan is an online archive of Hungarian pictures taken by amateurs in the twentieth century.  All phographs are licensed by a Creative Commons CC-BY-SA-3.0 License.  The archive houses an extraordinary collection of pictures of ordinary life in Hungary and is searchable in many ways.  The picture above, for example, taken from Pest, is of Vizivaros (Water Town), which is the area below the Castle on the Danube in Buda.  It is also the general area in which Katalin Street is located.

Occasionally Fortepan publishes a photo-essay on a particular topic.  Last year, they published a beautiful piece on Magda Szabo entitled Járt-e Szabó Magda a Katalin utcában?  (Roughly, "Did Magda Szabo Go to Katalin Street?)  The piece was edited by Kiss Eszter and Barakony Szabolcs (Images) and was based on research by Buda Atilla

I put the page through Google Translate.  Google Translate is a wonderful tool, especially for people who  don't read Hungarian.  But of course, it has limitations.  I tried  to smooth out some of the places where it garbled, mainly by putting various words and combinations of words through Google Translate again to get a different  context.  What follows is my loose translation, using  Google.  Sometimes, the meaning was clear.  Sometimes it could be relatively easily recovered.  And sometimes, I had to give up and cut.  My thanks to  the authors of this beautiful photo-essay.  My apologies for any mistakes my clumsy mechanics made.  And of course, all errors and typos are my own.

Note:  the passage from Katalin Street quoted at the end comes from the Len Rix translation.

Did Magda Szabo Visit Katalin Street?

One hundred years ago, on October 5, 1917, Magda Szabó was born [in Debrecan Hungary]. In the Fortepan archive we looked for pictures of the life of the author and the characters she created.  We have paired personal recollections, leaflets and novels with real and fictive sites. We looked at what the city was like when Magda Szabó was a child; how Budapest recovered from the blood and ruins [of World War II}; where she found a home, work and love; and how Budapest appeared in her writings. Some pictures were easy to identify, despite the changes in the name of the writer: others evoke the mood of the times.  Twelve images in the footsteps of reality and the creation of the writer.  

I.

Fotó: MAGYAR FÖLDRAJZI MÚZEUM / ERDÉLYI MÓR CÉGE / FORTEPAN

Magda Szabó first visited Budapest  in 1933 [with fellow students from Debrecan].  "When I left the train with the girls, I thought I was choking. I was overwhelmed by the traffic” she later said.  “I really discovered the city as a college student. . . .  I was traveling with a map, a guidebook, as if I were abroad. . . .  I went down the Flórián square under the rocks to see the Roman bath. I went through the museums. I searched for golden oaks on Margit Island and I sat down to write poems. [...] I once brought flowers to Petőfi Sándor street, put them under the memorial plaque and ran away. . . .   The poet Kosztolányi was  dying. . .I sat in the unfamiliar city in the garden of an unknown hospital on a bench, trying to make up my mind to go inside. . . .   I wanted to be there near the poet, at least once.”

II.

Foto: Fortepan

Szabo’s arrival in Budapest re-appears in many of her works.  In the book Katalin Street, the six-year-old Henriette Held moves with her parents to the never-before-seen capital, and the bridges and the unknown noises cause her anxiety, just as they did for Szabo.  The novel’s description of Katalin Street recalls the area around Vízivárosi [the area in Buda below the Castle walls]—Fo utca, Corvin and Szena ter, although it adds fictional details to the original. There was a church on the street, a sculpture in front of it, an old Turkish hollow near it, and . . .  the river flowed behind the bank of the Danube. The facade of the rusty, quaint houses looked out into the street, and the gardens full of flowers and wildlife faced in the direction of the Castle. Here lived side by side the Helds, the Elekes and the Biro family.

III.

(Fotó: Fortepan / FORTEPAN)

Magda Szabó moved from Debrecen to Budapest in the spring of 1945 after the Second World War, that "she might be really a writer now." "For us. . .  liberation was the most wonderful experience. I once wrote that the sun never burned like then, and the blue color was never so blue in the sky and the river never ran so fast. It was indescribable. . . .  In my bag were bread and bacon, poems and faded plays. . .. .  They disappeared at the railway station.’’  ‘Young Lady Cromwell’  [Puritan Debrecan was known as Protestant Rome] lived in my personality—strict, humorless (because she could not forget her dead) and was determined to do so.”  

IV.

(Fotó: Fortepan / FORTEPAN)

The new life began on the ruins, and it was an exciting and strange time for Katalin Csandy, the protagonist of Danaida. The school girl’s memories of the countryside collide with the post-war reality around the Nyugati [Western] Railway Station while she looks for a new home in Podmaniczky Street. "Katalin did not know Budapest well enough. . .  and although she did not have to leave the station, she was still frightened. The little she saw of the ill-lit city did not resemble the place she remembered: her school had once brought up students fot an excursion, and they all had fallen silent at the lights when they came to the student hostel.  Her abandoned birthplace was more solid and it was clear in post-War Pest that the damage done at home could not be compared with what Pest had suffered. In the middle of the street next to the railway station a kilometer long, multi-meter high pile of debris had been dumped, with a red train on its side, in which the ruin and scraps were frozen in the evening [...] This image remained in the post-siege of Budapest forever: people standing on top of a pile, with heavy radiation over them, and scraping debris around the clock in a crude little red-and-white fitting day and night. "

V.

(Fotó: MILITARY MUSEUM OF SOUTHERN NEW ENGLAND / FORTEPAN)

Hold utca 16 was Magda Szabo's first home in Budapest where she lived with two girls in a co-lease. She enjoyed the freedom. "No one here told  me when I could use the  bathroom, and I could buy books from my own job." But for a long time the city remained alien to her: "I lived in a barren, unheated apartment, I was in a ruinous building, the world was unknown and brittle. [...] But, of course, youth always triumphs on the ruins, spiritually, and in deed."   She lived here until 1948 and then moved to the flat of the elegant, educated and one-time womanizer Tibor Szobotka. Magda Szabó was not too communicative.  "It was so secret that my co-owner and partner,Gizike, did not know, until the driver arrived . . . and said  'Miss Szabo is asking for two suitcases and saying that she probably will not sleep at home because she married this morning.' Eyewitnesses said the response was enormous. [...] Do not say that I do not have the feeling that my privacy is really privacy."

VI.

An espresso café near Hold utca was Szabó and Szobotka's favorite venue, "big fish were painted on its walls, in a sea-green with green lighting; we named the place the Fish." The café was later a wedding hall and the square was called Ságvári Chapel (today the square of the Vértanúk). Although the Protestant Cromwell girl from Debrecan felt she was on dangerous ground, she was always there at the appointed time. She was scared and angry, as the room of the "the blond, blue-eyed, young Basti type”  was full of lovers and he forgot his writing.  He had asked for her hand saying "Do not be afraid. . . .  You do not tolerate a rival, no memory, no shadow, no dream, no reparation instead of losing anyone, or continuing. You're a pretty demanding girl, but you get it. You are neither reparation nor continuation, you are life.” 

VII.

(Fotó: BAUER SÁNDOR / FORTEPAN)

The mysterious wedding took  place on On June 5, 1948.  Magda Szabó's witness was László Bóka, Szobotká's Devecseri Gábor. Gizike knew nothing, but Ágnes received a detailed account. The day started as usual  "I came into the office at eight, I went home at eleven o'clock, I came back and worked at twelve. Then the Boss came out and told us to go to the Yugoslavian reception. My colleagues did not even look at me.  The dress was special:  Agnes, it was wonderful !!!!  Dark blue balloon cloth, white hat, skirt almost to the ankle, full-bodied, curly, huge white blouse, red nylon bag, red sandals, high red antelope gloves. "

VIII.

The couple lived for 12 years in  Szobotka's apartment—a difficult time.  It was only because of accuracy and a system that Szobotka’s lovers avoided each other in the   stairwell of the flat in the square of Veszprém. After the request, only Magda was left. "That's when we lunch at Gundel that day," she said, "not to deny it now. The women have disappeared, the past has come to an end, everything that has ever been, vanished, destroyed, I am the only one.  But then I will be hurting us both, every minute.  I listened and listened, to   myself (my genes), the Puritan Szobotka, the wail of my own, and I was tempted to lie in a bed where half Budapest was a guest, but I knew this sentence was a test now: now it measures me to blame my own law for the sake of our love and now we measure how much I like it. 'Pay the check,' I said. - Let's go home.' At Attila utca, where we lived later for twelve years, I went to the bathroom to undress. I found a blue robe, his belt, I pulled it up, and the whirlwind that caught him did not look like any of the memories of my life. Perhaps I felt something like that when I was born out of my mother's body when I started to live."

IX.

(Fotó: SIMON GYULA / FORTEPAN)

After receiving the Baumgarten Prize, which was revoked a few hours later, and after being kicking out of the ministry in 1950 and the district school in Szinyei Merse Street, Szabo faced the problems of the Rakosi era.  Daily, she taught the children of Jews who  had been deported or relocated.  Home visits became social work. Sometimes she did not find anybody except the housekeeper at home and told her that "the little boy who had woken up at night  had slipped down the staircase calling, Aunt Magdi, tell Aunt Magdi.’ Or in another house, a child said 'you can’t let her in, because she still has a client, they have not done yet.'". 

X

Fotó: FORTEPAN/ALBUM009 / FORTEPAN

Kerulet [city sectiton] VI. after Kerulet VIII, the new school, and the neighborhood proved to be a great thing. "My youth novels, as I have been teaching for a long time at the Horváth Mihály Square, and I have been walking around the square for so many years and in almost every house, almost always quoting the eighth district [but] without any stories related to my pupils themselves.”  She taught at school in 1956 and thereafter. "Our school was close to the Kilian barracks, many of our children lived in the area, the school was getting mined, our students died, and the disadvantaged parents just left home," she said later in an nterview. After  the appearance of [her first novel] Fresco in 1958, the air cooled at the school and colleagues were afraid they would be written about. The children did not welcome Aunt Magda's writerly ambitions. "When  Fresco appeared, I was known as a Teacher Szobotka in the School, but the parents soon realized  who I was and sent me copies of Fresco to sign.  I did not really want this book for eleven-twelve-year-old girls, so everytime I gave back a signed book, I added ‘kids, do not read it.’  I had a pupil, a good, smart little boy, Erika Bazsó, who was blood-red, dancing around in anger, and crying, 'Is not  aunt Magda ashamed of writing a book that her own class can not read?'  I was the head of the classrom, I laughed at myself, there was some justice in what the kid said.  Of course, this is not the only reason I started work elsewhere.  It was also because of Móra Kiadó and Éva Janikovszky who wanted me to write about what I see in my civil work.”

XI

Fotó: PIARISTA LEVÉLTÁR/HOLL BÉLA / FORTEPAN

  At the corner of Tavasmezo and Koszoru, there is an overturn in the Danaida novel, though Magda Szabó changed the streets of the area in the novel.  The already mentioned Katalin Csándy moves from Podmaniczy Street to Józsefváros. "She always liked Mak Street [...]. In this part [of the city] it was still clear that the capital was formed by the mingling of separate small spaces [and] that this district was a miniature country town sometime and then part of a giant body. She liked the old mill in Mák Street, which had recently made into baths, but she felt as if ghosts had rented the machines and were still grinding every night, as in a fairy-tale.  She also like Kozorut Kozt, where Gypsies lived.  At the corner of Pest Street and Kozorut, there was a figure of Christ, which in 1953, no one had reguilded or repainted:  he was the same as himself, but still was honored by a few flowers or candles, sometimes with a single little wreath. Here, the sweeper was worked in vain, it was always drenched, noise, bustle, and even smokers in the garden in summer, forgotten old plots with lots of flowers; he took the fresh bunches of flowers to sell to at the trolley stop of the great street in the formerly independent city."

XII

Fotó: FORTEPAN/ALBUM004 / FORTEPAN

Although Magda Szabó "has learned to live in a world capital," she has remained a country girl, a fan of the Hajdúság, Csongrád and Békés regions. She was always relieved to go to the countryside: Pest lacked the Debrecen dust under her teeth, the whirling whirlwind around the Great Church. When they left Tibor’s apartment, they chose one on Júlia Street because it reminded them of Debrecen—especially the statue of Csokonai.  Szabo said that when she had to describe the skies in her books, she imagined the heaven above the small streets of Hódmezővásárhely, or what she had seen from their home in Füvészkert street in Debrecen. At the same time, her youth novels, such as Danaida are said to be located in [Budapest] Józsefváros--the Horváth Mihály Square area. And how important was that after all?  Szabo wrote in Katalin Street, that time “so firmly rounded off and parceled up in youth” becomes “ripped apart” by “advancing age. . . . For the inhabitants of Katlin Street, “Time had shrunk to specific moments, important events to single episodes, familiar places to the mere backdrop of individual scenes, so that, in the end, they understood that of everything that had made up their lives thus far only one or two places, and a handful of moments, really mattered,  Everything else was just so much wadding around their fragile existences, wood shavings stuffed into a  trunk to protect the contents on the long  journey to come."

#Fortepan
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#KatalinStreet

Magda Szabo. The Door.

I recently read Magda Szabo's novel, The Door.  Szabo is an Hungarian writer, the novel is set in Budapest, and I bought it in a small bookstore in Buda.  So it came to me with many associations (and self-induced) demands.  During the last several months, I have read many Hungarian novels because I knew they were important--even when I wasn't always sure I liked the book.  The Door is an extraordinary novel--read in Budapest or anywhere else. 

The Door is narrated by a young female writer who has been pretty much silenced In Hungary.  The book opens when she and her husband are looking for someone to help keep their flat in order while they work.  They are referred by a friend to an older woman named Emerence who might take them on.  (It is Emerence who interviews the young couple, rather than the other way around.). Happily, they pass muster and Emerence includes them among the people she cleans, cooks, and shovels snow for.

Emerence is a strange and enigmatic character.  Although she rules the neighborhood, no one is allowed in her house. During the twenty or so years in which the novel takes place, Emerence and the young writer become close, even to the extent of Emerence treating her like a daughter.  But it is always on Emerence's terms and according to her standards of behavior. The secret of her house, like that of her past, is kept tightly guarded.  Eventually the young writer becomes recognized in Hungary and is awarded a prestigious prize.  In a strange plot twist, the writer is forced to choose between rescuing Emerence and attending the prize ceremony.  Her failure to make the right decision is foreshadowed in the novel's first scene.

Emerence and the writer live in two versions of  Hungary under Communism.  Emerence survived World War II and prides herself on being a worker.  She does not consider writing "work," and views the writer as spoiled and hapless. The writer comes from a privileged family and is able to sustain a somewhat luxurious life even in the midst of what would have been hard times in Hungary.  Both women are, in their way, admirable, but it is Emerence who holds the power--both in her unrelenting standards and in the secret past that lies behind her door.

The Door is a compulsively readable novel. Many of the reviews mention its autobiographical elements, but if it is autobiographical it is in no way sentimental or self-forgiving.  There is apparently also a recent movie starring Helen Mirren as Emerence, and I can well imagine her in the part.  But the novel's language--it's style, tone and affect--creates  a world that is uncanny and is difficult to visualize, even for someone reading it in the city in which it's set.  There is something deep, elemental, and Greek (as the novel hints) in its tragedy--a tragedy born in Hungarian history but hidden behind the barriers of conventional life.