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This gothic-inflected saga has received much attention in Europe for its quirky and confident take on 20th-century Hungarian history. It is sobering to reflect that its author not only has no personal memory of the end of communist rule in eastern Europe, but that he wasn’t even alive when the twin towers fell. Born in 2003, Nelio Biedermann is among the first wave of gen Z writers of fiction and Lázár is his debut novel.
The opening pages introduce us to a world straight out of gothic fable. In an isolated manor house by a forbiddingly dark forest, a strange-looking baby is born. This unearthly child, Lajos, is fated to carry forward the family name of the Lázárs, a noble dynasty with an alarming tendency to go mad, die violently, or both. Meanwhile, in another wing of the house lurks the baron’s older brother, Imre, who is barred from the baronetcy by reason of insanity.
In fact, Lajos von Lázár’s parentage isn’t quite what it appears. We soon learn that he is the product of an illicit liaison between Maria, the lady of the manor, and one of the grooms. Luckily for Maria, the groom is about to perish from a horse kick, leaving Maria to take the secret of Lajos’s paternity to her grave, an event which which, given the presiding atmosphere of the story, seems likely to be premature.
If the question of Lajos’s paternity is more complicated than it seems at first, then so is the genealogy of this novel. The book is actually an odd literary hybrid that’s only partly descended from fable. The apparent timelessness of the manor and the dark forest around it are a form of misdirection. Lázár gradually reveals itself to be a book about the way the fortunes of a single family are entwined with the historic upheaval of the 20th century.
The family seat, where the novel opens, stands close to the town of Pécs, on the southern border of present-day Hungary. On the chilly January day when Lajos draws his first breath, his homeland is still part of the Habsburg empire – the union of Austria and Hungary that also included the Balkan states and parts of northern Italy. As the story develops, enormous changes break up the empire and turn Hungary first into a fascist autocracy and then a satellite state of the Soviet Union. As the privileged former elite, the Lázárs will become a special target for the class warriors of Soviet Hungary. It seems worth mentioning at this point that while the novel’s author is Swiss, his paternal forebears are Hungarian.
Successive generations of the Lázár family live through all this turmoil over the course of the book. We follow Sandor and his wife Maria; their children Lajos and Ilona; and finally Lajos’s own children, Pista and Eva, up to the moment of the failed Hungarian uprising in 1956. Without feeling rushed, the novel moves fast, squeezing 60 years of upheaval into its 280 pages.
Translated by the prolific German-language translator Jamie Bulloch, Lázár is captivating and vivid, creating an intriguing atmosphere of secrets, repression and furtive but robust sexuality. With mordant economy, the narrative focuses on the Lázárs’ personal lives while also observing the historic changes happening just off-stage. The characters fall in and out of love; suffer bereavement, trauma and sexual turmoil. The patriarch Sandor seeks his solace in an extramarital affair with the bewitching but unwashed Mrs Virag, “licking the dirt from the soles of her feet, burying his nose into her armpits and placing her buttocks onto his face”.
“Beneath these,” the author tells us, “he was able to forget everything: the poor grain harvest, the national aspirations of the Balkan lands; Russia breathing menacingly at their backs, the great emperor king who, small and old, reigned over his crumbling realm; his brother; his wife; and even his weak, pale son”.
In fact, the analgesic effect of Mrs Virag’s bottom will prove only temporary. The pressure exerted by the family name and the stresses of 20th-century history turn out to be overwhelming. Sandor will eventually succumb to alcoholism. His violence and mood swings become part of the inheritance carried forward by the next generation.
A colourful cast of minor characters help energise the book. There are peculiar servants and tutors; an idealistic priest; a pioneering psychoanalyst called Mr Kiraly who helps Lajos untangle an unpleasant sexual trauma; and even a cameo from the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin.
Charming but uneven, the book’s chief shortcoming is that its episodic structure grows progressively less satisfying as it goes along. Instead of story development, we get a series of snapshots, taken from different moments and changing viewpoints. The scenes we are shown are often static, light on incident, but full of mood, interiority and backstory. And when characters speak, they don’t really talk to one another – at least not with the exchange of energy that makes you feel like you’re witnessing real human interaction. Intriguing Uncle Imre remains mysteriously underused, and there’s no real payoff to Lajos’s unearthly appearance, of which so much is made at the opening.
At its best, the novel illuminates with eccentric flair a chunk of history that makes up an important piece in the jigsaw of the 20th century. There’s a great deal to admire in it. Biedermann cares deeply about both history and literature. He nods at his influences – ETA Hoffmann, Woolf, Proust, Joyce, Mann – with allusions and borrowings. One page evokes In Search of Lost Time. A line from Joyce’s most famous story The Dead concludes one chapter and the last name of Sandor’s lover strikes me as a probable homage to Leopold Virag/Bloom, the hero of Ulysses. These moments suggest a determined talent that is consciously placing itself within an ambitious literary lineage. Anyone who reads this novel will be intrigued to see what its precocious author does next.
