Not Art Book

I won this book on first reads. It reads pretty smoothly for a new, uncorrected translation--there are minor errors, but not many.

First, the writing is genius. Those tell-tale signs of literary genius--shocking metaphor, sharp character, the lens of reality twisted just so--are all prevalent throughout the novel/memoir.

"In that cheap silence, amid the slurping of the machines keeping my mother alive, my mother's body alive, I recalled her laughter, my mother's rarer than rare laughter. Smiling, yes--she's smiling like a barley loaf on the oven peel: this rather less often--a cheerful glance, yes, but laughter, that was rare" (p. 12).

Look at the layers in those two sentences. Sadness, wry humor, and a subtle fury for her death; the merging of past and present; the outrageous comparison of his mother's smile to a loaf of bread. The book is full of gems like this.

There's no plot to speak of. To enjoy this book, you'd have to read it something like a Proust novel--not try to follow the story (or lack thereof) but enjoy the narrator's witticisms, his character sketches and neurotic rehashing of events. A previous reviewer called the narrator's life "dull". I guess some people think the day-to-day life in communist Hungary dull, but I found there were moments of real terror throughout the novel/memoir. Repressed terror, of course. Just as the author also expresses repressed sexuality (homo and hetero), repressed guilt, and most of all, repressed anger at his mother, which really only comes through in the ending pages, some of the most powerful in the book. Make no mistake; this narrator is angry, although he tries to hide it by dancing from subject to subject, hysterically repeating himself and cloaking his prose in mixed memories that layer over one another until the reader may get lost.

And the reader does get lost. Unless the reader is steeped in the literature, culture and soccer players of 1960s Hungary, the reader will get very lost. This can be discouraging, but it's part of the point of the novel. Esterhazy clearly, almost blatantly wrote this novel for himself, daring others to make sense of it. I found it interesting because the narrator's character is fascinating to absorb. I also found the book difficult to get through due to its incohesiveness. Recommended, but only to those with a great deal of literary patience.