Heh - Googled some on Esterhazy, found some interesting stuff. First off, to start with the straightforward, this is Amazon's page on
The Book of Hrabal; the Publishers' Weekly review gets the idea right as well as any.
Amazon has one of those "look inside" thingies that afford you the opportunity to browse freely in a book, a feature which I haven't actually ever used to browse through more than a page or two, since for some reason I don't like the notion at all, perhaps because of how it constitutes too great a violation of the principle that bookstore experiences should remain exclusively that, and what after all is nicer than to sit oneself down in a comfy chair at Borders and browse through any number of books one will never actually buy because of how all too exotic the subject matter is - for example, I now know that I would have done better to browse through the book of comparative essays I bought on my last visit to Hungary on the social and spatial development of New York and Budapest between 1870 and 1930 in such a manner, it being a fascinating subject matter but one, I've found so far, a tad too obscure to actually get round to reading in my day-to-day life which exists, at best, of reading a
TNR article on local LA politics over tea (though I do advise anyone in LA to read up and root for Antonio Villaraigosa, whose run for the mayorship appears to propose a rare opportunity for someone of traditional left-labor persuasion to gain a position of power again); and to think that, at the time, both me and my friend were quite starved of money and either of us could have bought 55 cartons of milk or 28 fine wholegrain loaves of bread or even, if there had been luxury spending, three and a half kilos of Prima Donna cheese or 8 Nineties Cream Teas at De Bakkerswinkel for the same price; this feature, in any case, is only available for just one of Esterhazy's books, not
The Book of Hrabal, but
Helping Verbs of the Heart.
The Guardian meanwhile has a review - and a very good review it is, too - on (one of?) Esterhazy's latest offers,
Celestial Harmonies, which first, delves into the rich family history of the Esterhazys - a legendary Hungarian noble family and erstwhile residents of the magnificent, if currently still slightly run-down Esterhazy Palace, "the Hungarian Versailles", picture
in this earlier A2K post (run-down it was because of how the Communist regime used it as stables and other such functions of demonstrative class disdain, but restorations that have taken already the better part of an era have restored much to former splendor already - and I do recommend an overnight stay in that Palace because, despite it being rather out of the way in an otherwise slightly forlorn typical Hungarian countryside village, it is a lovely place, with a garden full of trees shaped like cones that hover menacingly, in a romantic way, right outside your window; and because of the unique opportunity itself to stay overnight inside an actual Palace as uniquely glorious as that - and not in some added modern side-buildings either, no, inside the actual palace - especially since, more bizarrely still, the rooms are sparse, almost hostel like, and available (at least a few years ago) for a pittance, a literal handful of euros, the only obstacle being how the people who pick up the phone when you call to make a reservation only speak Hungarian, or did so at the time, in any case); in fact, this "Book One", "Numbered Sentences from the Lives of the Esterházy Family", flows out, writes
The Guardian, "in trademark Esterházy vein, telling, inventing, justifying, fantasising about [..] all the narrator's fathers, back to the dynasty's beginnings - pro-Habsburg and anti-Habsburg, the one who acquired his estates by uxoricide, another who betrayed Prince Rákóczi, another who became Bishop of Eger, or a member of the 1848 government, had sex with the kitchen maid, or farted before Catherine the Great ("The wise czarina nodded: an honest sound at last")." About all of Hungary's most romantic, if at times also most quixotic family, thus, while the second half of the book delves in particular into the relationship of Peter E. with his father.
Now this second narrative deserves a digression of its own because it's fraught with tragedy - not so much (or also, of course) the story itself, "a touching evocation of the extraordinary reverse in fortune lived through by Esterhazy's own father, from wealthy aristocrat to impoverished, spied-on labourer", as
The Independent put it, which was intended as something of "a prose celebration" of the man and what he, pars pro toto, represented to the writer in all of Hungarian history and identity, the integrity of which he saw his father as having held up even in the onslaught of communist intrusion - but what happened after Esterhazy finished it. Within days of his finishing of the novel, you see, the writer found out, having requested the Historical Office, the appointed custodian of the secret-police files of the Kádár era, to be allowed to inspect any documents that might be traceable relating to himself and his family, that his father had actually been an informer - for all of twentythree years, in fact, and apparently with such vigor that he was promoted to the status of tmb, or "secret agent". And as
The Hungarian Quarterly points out
in an instructive article about the matter: "Make no mistake about it, what Esterházy learned within days of finishing his big novel in certain respects immediately put the validity of that work in question, indeed, put a question mark on his entire oeuvre to date, because his writings have been based in no small measure on the fiction that, for all the stumbles and frailties, the moral right of father and family alike was incorruptible, and that the first person narrator loves his father, mother, grandparents, and their forebears, loves the very idea of being an Esterházy, and, ultimately, loves his native land, the world he regards as his home, not in any nationalistic but in an almost religious sense."
What Esterhazy then did, in response, in turns belies belief, in an awe-inspiring way, and definitely puts him in the tradition of eccentric genius of his family: he kept the fact secret, for the moment, from anyone but his wife, and set to work on a "Revised Edition" of his latest book, "fearing all along that the story might become public before he was able to tell his family and friends and his readers in a way that he felt was appropriate" and never, apparently, seriously entertaining the notion that he might attempt to cover it up himself. His Revised Edition became in effect "a diary, a set of parallel, interwoven journal-style commentaries on the threefold process of examining the documents, copying from them and cogitating on them" and in the words of TNR's Andre Bernstein "reprints numerous passages from his father's spy reports and confronts Mátyás's long-concealed collaboration without evasion or excuse, but also without renouncing his love for a man who, no matter what has come to light, survives in his memory as the father whom he admired and cherished as a boy".
All this is crucial to keep in mind since, for some unfathomable reason, Esterhazy's US publishers published the translation of his
Celestial Harmonies without waiting for one of the Revised Edition, which as far as I can quickly see in fact still has not appeared in America and more flabbergastingly, as
blogger Rake's Progress, from whose post I took the TNR excerpt, notes, was not mentioned in any of the American reviews of
Celestial.. except for that one by Bernstein! Not a single reviewer thought it might be relevant to note "the fact that Esterházy learned his father wasn't quite the man he thought he was"; or is it that every other US newspaper and journal neglected to invite a reviewer who would actually be informed about the current Hungarian scene and that the reviewers who did tackle the book were simply ignorant of the splash Esterhazy's Revised Edition and its German translation had made, even though it was one of postcommunist Hungary's most perplexing revelations? Either case, enough to leave you nonplussed.
To wrap this up, finally, since we're on the subject of settling records, I'll link you in a brief further taste of both Esterhazy's style and the myth of his family, namely this
Hungarian Quarterly online offering by Esterhazy,
J'Accuse - Setting It Straight, in which he deals finally (well, sort of) with the role of "his grandfather's grandfather's grandfather's grandfather's grandson's younger sister's" illegitimate son, the notorious Captain Esterházy (or was he?) of the Dreyfus affair.
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