If among a writer’s works there is also one entitled Babonáskönyv (lit. Book of Superstitions), a measure of caution is in order; yet I am not about to speak of the future, only of the past that has already occurred, and so I can state that those born in the 1940s can hardly regard their own year of birth as a winning ticket in life’s lottery. Ferenc Temesi saw the light of day – or perhaps rather the light of the lamp – on 30 November 1949, at the very end of the decade, but even that year was one of the darkest of a horrific era. Taking seriously a writerly attitude that values facts and historical accuracy, let me mention only a few events from the “year of the turn” spanning from 1948.

January: Mátyás Rákosi [Hungarian communist politician, de facto leader of Hungary in the late 1940s–50s] declares that “people’s democracy” fulfils the function of the dictatorship of the proletariat. The MAORT trial [a political show trial against the Hungarian–American Oil Company]. February: the Mindszenty trial [show trial of Cardinal József Mindszenty, head of the Hungarian Catholic Church]. May: in the parliamentary elections, more than 96% vote for the candidates of the People’s Front [communist-controlled electoral coalition]. June: for Book Week, works by Mihály Farkas, Lenin, Erik Molnár, Mátyás Rákosi, József Révai, László Rudas and Stalin are published. The arrest of László Rajk and his associates. The final issue of Válasz [influential interwar Hungarian literary journal] appears. August: a new constitution. September: the Rajk trial [political show trial]. The first Soviet atomic bomb. Five-Year Plan bonds. October: in Romania, a trial against the leaders of the Hungarian People’s Union [organisation representing the Hungarian minority]. December: a law on the first Five-Year Plan. Stalin’s 70th birthday.

Of course, the foetus, and later the infant, could know nothing of all this – but his teacher parents could experience and later pass on a great deal of it to him. This year, and then the 1950s, the 1960s and the 1970s, shaped and reshaped everyone – in worse cases, they deformed them.

Making a great leap forward in time: Ferenc Temesi was nineteen when, after a long wait, his first piece of writing appeared in print. He was able to hold his first independent volume in his hands nine years later, at the age of twenty-eight (Látom, nekem kell lemennem [lit. I See That I Must Go Down], 1977). In the meantime, years of university study and youthful literary apprenticeship had passed, and this protected him from an over-hasty and forgettable start to his career. Contemporary criticism received the book with restrained but well-intentioned appreciation, and classified its author among the prose writers who had made their début in the preceding decade. Not entirely justifiably. In theory, Temesi could indeed have been the ‘Benjamin’ of that generation, yet even then he was much more a representative of a newer cohort – something that only became clear a decade later. What misled critics was the fact that many kindred features could be detected between his world and that of the writers who had set out before him. In almost every case, the primacy of personal experience was decisive, leading to an autobiographical tone and to the portrayal of young people who were unable to feel at home in the given social circumstances. They were taught to become public-spirited individuals and to build the new socialist society, yet they continually ran up against limitations and thus drifted ever more aimlessly.

This state of mind had taken shape in the decade after the 1956 Revolution and was rooted in the experience of the uprising and its consequences [the crushed Hungarian Revolution against Soviet rule in 1956]. Temesi and his peers, however, began to come of age in the second half of the 1960s; for them, the beat movement, and then 1968 and its repercussions, were formative experiences. Although they automatically became members of KISZ (Hungarian Young Communist League) at the age of fourteen, if they were not careerist types they subsequently tried to stay out of intensive organisational activity – as Temesi did at the University of Szeged. These young people are hesitant in a different way, they “loiter” differently. In the early stories, the author’s alter ego, perhaps in the act of mapping out a life’s direction, perhaps ironically, is given the name Győző [meaning ‘winner’ in Hungarian]. What interests him? Language learning, beat music (he even sings in amateur bands), amateur theatre, and preparation for a writer’s career.

The most mature piece in the first book is A történet, amely sehogy sem tetszett K.-nak (lit. The Story “K.” Did Not Like at All). In it, students perform, with great success in several parts of the country, a former Dadaist play by a famous writer. The work is not named, but the staging of Óriáscsecsemő (lit. The Giant Baby) by Tibor Déry [major Hungarian novelist of the 20th century] was indeed a significant event. I quote from the story: “This generation doesn’t want to grow up at all, as far as I can see, said the master, as we were making our way towards the orchestra’s changing room. You couldn’t change anything anyway, I said. But unfortunately one has to grow up eventually, said the master. Just look at me.” This situation is indirectly expressed even by the book’s title: “did not like at all”. And again here: “doesn’t … at all”, “couldn’t … anything”. The title alludes to a folk tale in which a girl called Hajnal is lowered into the underworld by her brothers. What is to be done? One possible answer is a defiant search: the world of beat music, theatre, writing, learning, and of course love. On the other hand, there is also the drinking that can easily turn into excess, and the pursuit of sexual adventures. Must one go down to hell? And stay there? The uncertainty of approaching a goal, the danger of straying into a dead end, the full duality of existence – all this unfolds in its entirety in the writer’s novel trilogy.

Por (Dust, 1986, 1987)

Another nine years pass before Por (Dust) appears, published in two parts in 1986 and 1987. Those nine years, and the outlook on the writer’s role that was slowly shaped and hard-won during that time, were later formulated with lasting validity in Temesi’s curriculum vitae:

“In Hungary – would you believe it – politically engaged writers are the ones in fashion. Yet politics is not a fruitful path for prose. To write, fundamentally, means to remain impartial. A writer is someone who knows how to suffer well. […] A true writer always wants everyone and everything, yet in reality needs nothing and no one. There are countless ways of classifying writers, but only one truly matters: incisors and molars.

I made this detour in order to indicate the nine years of self-destruction and/or preparation through which I shaped myself for my first novel. I wrote continuously for three years and two and a half months. I wanted it to be a novel that would be read as long as there are Hungarians. The novel was the setting, my dead love the gemstone.” (Önlélekrajz [lit. Self-Psyche-Portrait], 1994)

Dust truly became the book of arrival. After its publication it was discussed in more than thirty reviews and analyses, and even those who voiced numerous critical remarks acknowledged its exceptional qualities. In time it became the first part of a trilogy – Híd (Bridge, 1993) and Pest [short for ‘Budapest’] (1996) followed – and it went through several editions, the third (2002) appearing in a revised and reworked form.

One of the first questions raised in its reception was whether it was a postmodern work. This was partly because “postmodern” had become one of the catchwords applied to the new writers of the 1980s, and partly because Temesi himself, in the chapter entitled kritika (lit. criticism), declared that “in Hungarian literature, this novel is the first consciously postmodern work”. His interpretation, however, stood rather far from the “scholarly” understanding of the term prevalent at the time. For him, Gabriel García Márquez was the father and greatest master of postmodernism. This tendency, in his view, was a response to twentieth-century modernism, which had created an elite culture and turned away from the reader (Proust, Joyce, Kafka, Miklós Szentkuthy [Hungarian novelist and essayist, associated with modernist experimentation]). Latin American writers, by contrast, “recognised the simple truth that there are only provinces – and everything is a province”. Their works always contain something popular and mythical. The Hungarian novel, he argued, must be characterised by a sense of history, humour, irony and self-irony; it must turn towards the reader, “tempting the impossible, attempting to bridge the gap between elite and mass culture, even if only with a narrow suspension bridge”. For “people want to see, hear, read stories. […] This Dictionary posits its User as an equal partner, and therefore does indeed demand a certain intellectual effort. But it is all STORY!”

In other words, postmodern poetics – though not a postmodern worldview – appear here as a development of the late-modern. There is still no accepted name for this perspective that is simultaneously old and new, even now, long after the postmodern has passed its zenith; yet in this endeavour, Temesi’s novel, and his since-expanded oeuvre, are of pioneering and defining significance. Dust offered striking proof that neither a holistic worldview in essence, nor late modernity, had “died”, and that radical postmodernism was, in Hungarian literature of the time, only one tendency among others. Interpreters were also misled, in connection with the novel, by the dictionary form – that is, its conspicuous fragmentation – and by the then almost “magical” critical buzzwords of intertextuality.

Another key issue, both in Dust and in the oeuvre as a whole, is the relationship between fictional and non-fictional modes of narration. It is indisputable that in Ferenc Temesi’s writings and novels the autobiographical element is particularly strong, and that this is complemented by family-historical dimensions as well. For him, autobiography organically includes the biographies of parents, grandparents, earlier ancestors and relatives, as well as of loves and friends. Dust is to a significant extent also a family novel; in Bridge one of the main characters is the maternal grandfather; and the very title Apám (lit. My Father) speaks for itself. In principle, autobiography belongs strictly to the realm of factual literature – but in a novel everything is possible, and thus it is hardly worth calculating what percentage of what is written could be verified by documents. About the narrator of Dust and its protagonist of Temesi’s own age, the novel states: “It is more than doubtful that the Dictionary Writer is identical with András Szeles: it is likely.” The same can be claimed of the narrator and the author – so that the identity and difference of writer, narrator and fictional hero are realised through multiple layers of mediation. Moreover, Ferenc Temesi was in fact born on St Andrew’s Day, and in his adolescence and early youth he did indeed live in a somewhat stormy, whirlwind [Hungarian: ‘szeles’] fashion.

Alongside lived and collected biographical and family-historical material, numerous documents – in original or adapted form – can also be read in Temesi’s works. The city of Dust is Porlód, modelled on Szeged [city in southern Hungary, a major cultural and university centre], and the work is also a novel of that city. The number of documents available for the understanding of a single individual in the nineteenth, and especially the twentieth, century is virtually infinite – completeness is an illusion. And yet the novelist processed, sifted and shaped into novel-chapters such an abundance of material that, through the use of the dictionary form, it is capable of creating the illusion of totality. Fragmentation and discontinuity produce the opposite of what one might expect: the “impossible” great novel is realised.

In this novel, the events of roughly one hundred and forty years (1833–1973) are presented in 660 dictionary entries, across 1,100 pages. Momentous historical events and grey everyday life, historical and natural catastrophes, and both collective and individual celebrations of joy are all woven into its fabric. It is the entirety of life, the entirety of reality. A body of material that strives for both extensive and intensive totality is condensed here; reconstruction and recollection are at once objective and visionary. Within this 140-year span, the destinies of six generations unfold, with three families at the centre. The novel’s concrete setting is the Great Hungarian Plain, more precisely the Southern Great Plain, its great city Porlód–Szeged and its river, the Tisza. Set against the counterpoint of the Great Plain’s dust is a flowing liquid – both as the Tisza and as alcohol. It is the glasses raised in taverns and the river Tisza that make life more bearable. Porlód lies in Central Europe. The city’s history is therefore Central European and Hungarian. The highlighted points of intersection are connected to major periods and events in Hungarian history, from the Reform Era [a period of political and cultural modernisation in Hungary in the early 19th century] through the World Wars and up to the present of the 1970s, though complemented by characteristically Szeged-based events.

The novel has three clearly distinguishable narrative layers, each of which maintains a loosely chronological order. These three layers are not independent of one another, and as the narrative moves closer to the novel’s present time, they increasingly merge, finally becoming one at the conclusion. One layer comprises the sequence of events in the family saga, culminating in the figures of the elder András Szeles and his son. The second layer traces the life story of the younger András Szeles, from early childhood to the final school-leaving examinations. Finally, the third layer presents András’s fate during his university years – the present time of the novel’s action. This, however, is also turned into “the past” by a fourth layer, that of reflection, whose only true protagonist is the narrator, the Dictionary Writer, who recalls events from the distance of a decade. The individual layers alternate continuously, in a rhythmic order, sometimes even within a single, multi-stage entry.

Dust is not only a family novel. It is also a generational – and thus a coming-of-age – novel. The younger András Szeles is a central figure not only in his own person but also as a representative of his generation. On the level of the plot, characteristic motifs of generational life appear: beat music, school, university, friendship, sex, love, and drinking in bars. Yet this work also differs from most of the contemporary novels portraying this generation. Here, the young generation does not appear as the opposite of the given world, but as part of that world, within the ongoing flow of history – a fact that stems from the consistency of its family-novel perspective. The novel is not “the twilight of a family”, nor “the end of a family saga”, but the living present of a family, or rather a cluster of families. Even if each new generation rebels, in the end it nonetheless forms part of the chain. Even through negation, it affirms. For, as the novel states: “Every family novel around here is also a kind of rehabilitation. The restoration of the ancestors’ and the fathers’ honour – a correction and a form of reparation. That is, if one loves one’s parents, of course.”

The Dictionary Writer is a modest, reticent man. He reveals his instinctual life with the greatest openness, yet speaks of his emotions in a restrained – though unambiguous – manner. Throughout, the novel conveys that he loves Katalin, loves his parents, his forebears, Porlód, and his Hungarian identity. In an era marked by the disintegration of communities and the devaluation of their values, the novel emphasises the values that reside within them. And it manages to be both archaic and strikingly new at the same time, confessing its love of homeland in words that are free of pathos, yet nonetheless capable of calling pathos into being. Porlód is a fragment of Hungary; the Dictionary Writer is its citizen.

Híd (Bridge, 1993)

Dust can be read as a complete, closed work in its own right – yet in the case of Bridge (1993) it becomes clear that it is, in effect, a continuation of the previous novel, in which the university student András Szeles, together with his beloved, falls victim to an accident. The young man, however, survives, and under the name István Zoltán he becomes one of the main protagonists of the new novel. Arriving in Budapest, he begins working at the University Library. Híd is both the story of a long life and that of a shorter life-phase, and their interrelationship appears for almost the entire novel to be a matter of chance from the perspective of the librarian, who is commissioned to carry out scholarly assistant work for an academic preparing a village monograph, and to process the literary estate of Pál Tóth. The haystack-like randomness, heterogeneity and uneven quality of this bequest provide the processor with an opportunity to cast an ironic eye not only on the events of our century, but also on the average person who stumbles through them.

Pál Tóth was born in 1890 and died at some point after 1975. He lived an active life almost throughout, mainly in Tengőd, a small town on the Great Plain whose model is Kistelek, near Szeged. His father was a master weaver and a harvest foreman; the son became a merchant. Two types intermingle in him: in character, the man who can make his way in the world and the dupe; in ability, the professional and the dilettante. He is resourceful, for he always manages to get back on his feet, within the limits set by circumstance, and this is possible because he is purposeful and hopeful; yet at the same time he is also a fool, for he never learns from events, and not always even at his own expense. Indestructible optimism and naïveté characterise him simultaneously. Meanwhile, he masters his profession well and practises it successfully. As an adult, he obtains his secondary-school certificate, then a law degree. At the same time he is a dilettante writer who unceasingly scribbles his poems, plays and stories, and in these he is always an unthinking follower of the officially sanctioned spirit of the age [the expectations of successive political regimes]. As a politician he is likewise an amateur – and he pays the price for this both in 1919 and after 1945 [periods of radical political upheaval in Hungary].

It is only towards the end of the story that István Zoltán begins to suspect that the unknown person whose estate he is researching is none other than his own maternal grandfather. The novelist, however, knows this exactly, and even communicates it in the very first chapter, although the matter-of-fact narrative technique almost makes the reader forget this fact. The young man’s life history prior to the novel’s main action is in practice identical with that of András Szeles. The change of name nevertheless has meaning, not primarily because the student has become a working adult, or the man of Porlód a resident of Budapest, but because Zoltán is an essentially different kind of personality: the death of his beloved, this irreparable loss, and – strangely enough – the “gain” of having survived, have transformed him. The energetic, dynamic student has become a meditative, contemplative man, for whom dreams and dreaming mean the most. Zoltán searches for his possible vocation, but for the time being does not find it.

Pál Tóth is a man of presumed and actual rationalism, the perpetual recommencer, the entrepreneur. István Zoltán is rather a man of ideas, who lives his inner life more intensely than the outer one. For Tóth, everyday working life was productive and worthy of recognition, whereas in the world of ideas – in art – his activity became formal and forgettable. For Zoltán, by contrast, everyday working life is formal and forgettable, while existence in the realm of ideas becomes increasingly important. The ultimate outcome of this mode of being in the novel is the recognition of Pál Tóth’s fate – that is, the birth of the bridge between grandfather and grandson, between generations, life-forms and worldviews, ultimately between life and death. István Zoltán’s task is to research a fragment of the past; yet this past concerns him not so much as a historian as on an existential-philosophical level. He must try to understand a fatally false world: why it is as it is, and whether it might even be conceivable that it could be otherwise. Dream-journeys across the wider world assist him in this understanding (it is known from Ferenc Temesi’s oeuvre that the author himself undertook such journeys in reality). Travel through the past and through dreams alike leads to the recognition that one must assume one’s familial and national past, one’s bonds – that without love of family and homeland, the human being is incomplete.

For Ferenc Temesi, a novel only becomes writeable when an appropriate form and structural construction emerge to match his conceptual vision. In the case of Dust, the idea and carefully conceived realisation of a dictionary form – composed of a magically suggestive 666 entries – made it possible to encompass a vast temporal distance and to bind parallel narrative strands into a single structural unity. Bridge is a twin novel of two life paths: across nine larger structural units, the smaller chapters of the two “half-novels” alternate. Pál Tóth’s life story is marked, in emblem-like fashion, by figures from Tarot cards, while István Zoltán’s is signalled by Chinese fortune-stick symbols referring to his destiny. The solution is ingenious, yet as the meaning of the symbols remains obscure to the reader, one can only surmise that there is a meaningful connection between the symbols and the significance of the individual chapters.

Pest (1996)

After the publication of Bridge, another three years pass before Pest (1996) appears, and with it the trilogy comes into being. This novel, too, binds the past to a new phase in the life of the alter ego named Zoltán Tengődi. Here as well, the past is represented by an estate: the writings of Kornél Hidi, archpriest (1888–1976), which were intended as the raw material for a planned – but never written – Porlód novel, and which consist mainly of a series of anecdotes. The fictional character himself entrusted these slips of paper, arranged into thirty-six envelopes, to the young writer Zoltán, hoping that he would one day write the novel of the city. And this is how Pest ends: on 11 April 1983, at eleven o’clock, Zoltán begins to work. “By then I had long known that I was writing the history of my father’s family.” The trilogy can thus become whole.

Both of Pest’s protagonists, and both narrative planes, examine the same fundamental question: are we capable of writing a novel? This is a question both in the sense of whether we possess sufficient talent to do so, and also whether we can create a Hungarian novel that is Hungarian not only in its language, but also in its conscious and open attachment to our literary and historical traditions. At the centre of this novel is the process in which the writer, wrestling with his material and with inhibiting circumstances, arrives at the point of actually beginning the work. The reader, of course, almost inevitably knows that the novel has long since been written and has achieved success. In this sense, too, Pest is the concluding keystone of the trilogy: it is the novel of a novel – not of its actual writing, but of the years in which the writer matures for the task.

The tellingly named (Hungarian ‘híd’ means ‘bridge’) Kornél Hidi – a created figure – has neither a biography nor a continuous story, only a collection of anecdotes, a barely ordered heap. To this, Tengődi attaches his own life story. The character’s surname refers back to the title of the previous novel, while his given name perhaps alludes to Esti Kornél by Dezső Kosztolányi [one of the major Hungarian modernist writers], to that splitting of the self which stretches between priestly vocation and a literary life conducted under pseudonyms – and perhaps also to the opposition between the priest’s way of life and that of Tengődi. The name Zoltán Tengődi is itself speaking: in the previous novel the young man’s surname was Zoltán, while the grandfather lived in Tengőd.

The everyday life of Zoltán Tengődi – that is, TZ – is organised around three main layers. Women, sex and love form one; artistic life, the second; vocation and literary creation, the third. Meanwhile, he learns Chinese. Having already progressed beyond the beginnings, he is reading The Thirty-Six Stratagems, and the structure of the novel is shaped accordingly. Thirty-six envelopes – thirty-six stratagems – divide the work into six volumes, each of which bears a title referring to the stratagems of some kind of battle, indicated by several Chinese characters and their corresponding meanings. The “war” that calls for stratagems is, on the one hand, life itself – work, friendships, love – and, on the other, and above all, creation: the journey towards the novel.

Within the novel’s worldview, the highest values are: Nadine, first life companion and then wife; the foster daughter and the shared child; and the writerly material found with the help of the envelopes – that is, a past that can be made personal; and finally, the capacity to express all this: the novel itself. The priest’s very last note is a First World War frontline recollection. On the basis of this, he formulates a teaching inspired by the Bible: “One must love people, this alone is the way.” And this, too, becomes the young writer’s guiding principle.

Short Fiction

During the years in which the trilogy was being written – and in the period that followed – Ferenc Temesi became an ever more accomplished practitioner of short prose, realising a remarkable variety of genres and forms. Autobiographical elements and a strong sense of personal presence are ubiquitous in his writing. In the more traditional sense, he produced relatively few works that could be labelled simple short stories (e.g. A zsidó Isten Debrecenben [The God of the Jewish in Debrecen]; A szív böjtje [lit. The Heart’s Fast]; Egy új-zélandi író emlékirataiból [lit. From the Memoirs of a New Zealand Writer]), yet four pieces from the series Vissza az irodalomba (lit. Back to Literature) may also justifiably be placed in this category, since they apply the usual personal mode of narration to a plot line that can be read as autobiography. The autobiographical-confessional character is expressed most directly in Parlandó (portörténeti jegyzetek) (lit. Parlando [Notes on the History of Dust]), published in the volume A 3. könyv (lit. The Third Book, 1989), which offers a reflective, fragmentary, essay-like account of becoming a writer, of writing Dust, and of its reception. Ferenc Temesi does not wish to make the work of future philologists unduly difficult. A passionate autobiographer, he once even published, across almost one hundred pages, a selection of letters written to him. Élet és irodalom (lit. Life and Literature, in the volume A szív böjtje [lit. The Heart’s Fast], 1991) provoked distaste in some, yet it is an instructive text in which, following a chronological order, letters by – among others – Szilveszter Ördögh, Tibor Déry, Attila Szepesi, Péter Lengyel, István Császár and Judit Kemenczky [Hungarian writers and cultural figures] are included.

Ferenc Temesi also conquered and re-enchanted a genre that, in the decades following 1948, had long been almost condemned to death, despite having had such great masters as Endre Ady, Dezső Kosztolányi and Sándor Márai. The pieces gathered mainly in Az éjféli utas (lit. The Midnight Traveller, 2000) and Gabo meg a halál (lit. Gabo and Death, 2003) are feuilletons that follow the very best traditions. Beyond broad erudition and wide-ranging interests, this genre requires a light, witty style and an unmistakably individual voice. The feuilleton is the genre of a literary reflection on current affairs; its natural habitat is the daily and weekly press, and thus it can lay only a limited claim to permanence. Ferenc Temesi’s texts, however, belong among the exceptions: colourful and engaging, they are mosaic-like portraits of an era, speaking from a present that is already turning into the past, and reaching towards the future as well.

From the very beginning, the genres of journalism fascinated Ferenc Temesi – though from a creative, not a journalistic, point of view. Old and new newspapers also served as sources for his novels, and he was visibly drawn to the structure and spirit of earlier periodicals. A good newspaper has sections; its organisation matters; and beyond the news value of novelty, repetition of themes and the continuous presence of strong authors are equally important. It was clearly not the schematic nature of the decades of socialist press that made Ferenc Temesi an admirer of the newspaper form, but rather those older papers – sometimes charming precisely because of their quaintness – which he encountered while gathering material for the trilogy. In these, not only feuilletons, poems and short stories were published, but also novels in instalments. Without literature, a worthwhile newspaper was unthinkable in those days.

In more than 1,100 large-format pages of A kölcsön idő (lit. Borrowed Time, 2005–2006), the author writes: “Every writer would like a newspaper of his own, for himself. This – and the second volume too – is my newspaper-novel and novel-newspaper in one.” The paper was “founded in 1990”, and what we read are twenty issues of Volumes XI–XV. The photographs come from the author’s own archive. Generic and thematic diversity, an overflowing delight in storytelling, a fondness for anecdotes and aphorisms, readability and wit all characterise this work, which contains recurring cycles, themes, and authorial alter egos speaking under various names. Several texts are included that we already know from earlier volumes; for example, his “film-novel” Pejote appears here under the title Tenacatita, illustrated with photographs. In a sense, therefore, the book may even be regarded as a kind of ‘Temesi breviary’. One cannot purchase such a newspaper at the news-stand – though it would be good if one could. The title, incidentally, refers to the fact that since 1973 – when, in a car accident, he lost his beloved and himself came close to death – the writer has been living in “borrowed time”. It was in this existential condition – and, to a significant extent, also in memory of “K.” – that Dust was born, and the covers of this later pair of volumes are adorned with two photographs of “K.”.

Both before and after the newspaper-novel, further “autobiographising” novels appeared. Királyáldozat (lit. The King’s Sacrifice, 2000) tells the unconventional love story between the forty-year-old writer Gábor Tamási and the seventeen-year-old secondary-school student Vera Villám. The writer is writing a novel, wishes to write, but in the meantime must also make a living, and therefore undertakes translation work, screenplay writing, language teaching, feuilleton writing, and even fortune-telling. In “borrowed time”, it is the drudgery of everyday life that constrains him, but more important than anything is love – and even more so, genuine creative work. The structure of this novel is provided by a famous historical chess game, in which the grandmaster playing Black resigned after the 23rd move in his struggle against an amateur. In the novel, it is the man who plays Black – and it is he who loses. This relationship appears as a subsidiary strand in Amszterdam stb. (Amsterdam, Etc., 2008) as well. Here, the writer is called Farkas, and one day he receives an invitation from his Dutch friend Jaap. In total, he travels to Amsterdam and its surroundings on seven occasions, and this constitutes the structural framework of the work. Disguised as, or presented as, guest texts, diary entries and Dutch folktales add further colour to the narrative.

Bartók

The significance of the Bartók novel can be compared only with that of Dust. No one had previously written a genuinely accomplished work of belles-lettres about the composer Béla Bartók. Many people know a few of Bartók’s works, yet his life and personality are far less familiar. Ferenc Temesi’s novel draws on numerous documents, freely abridging and expanding them – sometimes in quotation marks, sometimes with reference to the source, sometimes in a concealed form. He did not write a biographical monograph, but a novel – shaping his own image of Bartók. Yet the writer would have been untrue to himself had he not also built something autobiographical into this biographical novel: the story of the Biographer. Thus, once again, a twin novel is created: Bartók’s life-novel and that of one significant phase in the writer’s own life are continuously patterned upon one another. This compositional method recalls that of Mikhail Bulgakov (The Master and Margarita) and Thomas Mann (Doctor Faustus). It is hardly accidental that in both of these novels the demonic plays a significant role. The young Bartók also wrestled with “demons”, both in his worldview and in his works; in Temesi’s novel, however, these appear with a gentle rationalism, and viewed from the perspective of Bartók’s entire career, this is justified. The situation is different for the Biographer, whose descents into hell and examples of human frailty are revealed to us with a candour that deserves admiration.

Alongside the continuous twinning of the biographical novel, the Bartók novel is itself divided in two by the composer’s arrival in America in the autumn of 1940. The work unfolds along two parallel narrative lines: one running from 1881 to 1940, the other from 1940 until his death in the autumn of 1945. These three chapter-sequences alternate in a wave-like motion, and each is marked by a pictogram at the beginning of its first line. Thanks to this technique, the child prodigy, the youth and the genius; the beginner and the mature artist; the seeker and the man preparing to take his leave can be shown simultaneously, and alongside the shaping of the personality we may also sense its essential identity.

The novel’s three narrative threads, each located in a different time-plane, encompass 110 chapters. Structurally, chapter 69 is of particular importance, in which the Biographer appears before Bartók in San Francisco and conducts an interview, stepping back from the new millennium. According to some music aestheticians, the golden ratio plays a significant role in Bartók’s musical compositions, and the novel likewise accepts – indeed, Temesi himself is drawn to – the structural principles that follow from this idea. Chapter 69 stands at the point of the golden section, and the virtual co-existence of the two protagonists is indeed important, if only because it is difficult to imagine two more divergent personalities than Bartók and the writer. Although both are searching, creative individuals, Bartók is a slave of both art and scholarship, while the writer presents himself more as a life-devouring personality, who is still seeking the true path.

The Biographer at times calls himself “Soul-portraitist”, and in Bartók’s case this is entirely fitting. The portrait is authentic. His frailty as a human being reveals itself almost in its full complexity. Three motif-clusters play the principal role in this: the mother–son relationship, the history of his loves, and his experience of nature. Particularly significant is the shaping of Bartók’s sense and interpretation of being, his worldview. His personally inflected pantheism gradually took shape. He thought in dimensions broader than humanity, and through this he found his way back to humankind, to Hungarianness and to individuality. In his outlook, the factor of time became decisive. For him, the ancient and the contemporary were not opposites, because within the flow of time he discovered those values that are, at least for humankind, timeless. The novel consistently demonstrates the shaping of both Bartók’s – and the narrator’s – sense of Hungarian identity. The novel’s working title was the “48–56 piano”, that is, the inventory number of the young artist’s rented piano, and this alludes to 1848 and 1956 [key years of Hungarian revolution and national struggle]. Bartók was not a politically engaged personality. He did make occasional public gestures – most pointedly emigration itself – but in essence he was born into, grew into, and remained within the condition of the artist throughout his life. In his view, politics disturbed work. The novel presents precisely this consistent professional attitude: Bartók’s views on society and his worldview were truly expressed in his music.

The Biographer repeatedly refers to events from his life that occurred long before the years of writing the novel, yet it is primarily the present of the twenty-first century that is revealed in his fate. In political terms, the period after 1990 [the post-communist era in Hungary] is shown, and, as historical prelude, the narrative can look as far back as 1945. What is offered is not a critique of either socialism or capitalism, but rather a rendering of life’s possibilities and their inherent limitations. He is even capable of viewing himself with irony. A love affair comes to an end, he recovers from a serious illness, he steps away from his former life-devouring mode of existence, and through the writing of the novel he is able to close an important phase of his life and career. And the writer can then go on living – and writing – his own life, and that of others as well.

Apám (lit. My Father, 2013)

Although the figure of the father had appeared in several earlier works, in Apám (lit. My Father, 2013) he becomes the titular protagonist. This short novel, too, is built on documents – those secret police reports that were written about the author’s father for a decade and a half after 1956. The father was a primary-school teacher and headmaster in Szeged, and after 1945 one of the local leaders of the Független Kisgazdapárt [Independent Smallholders’ Party, a pre-communist democratic agrarian party suppressed after the communist takeover]. His only “crime” was that in 1956 he took part in a few meetings concerning the reorganisation of the Smallholders’ Party. It was primarily two close friends, regular guests in the family home, who informed on him. They described the father as an incorrigible enemy of the socialist system. Only many years later did he begin to suspect that reports were being written about him – but he could not have known that they were coming from his best friends. In the novel, an acronym recurs as a motif: HEAOV (lit. IOMFHRD), meaning “if only my father had read this”.

The structure of the biographical novel follows roughly the chronological order of the reading of the archival material, and the narrator’s reflections are fitted to this sequence. The reports concern the father, the family and acquaintances; running parallel to them are the narrator’s recalled biographical fragments, which supplement, modify or refute what the documents claim. A series of explicitly present-tense statements by the narrator, now looking back from almost a historical distance, assesses above all the decade and a half after 1956 – and, more broadly, the entire socialist era in Hungary – its political system and the limited possibilities of life within it. In this novel, too, the biographical, the autobiographical and the family-historical dimensions merge into one. The author himself refers to the work on several occasions as a “police novel”. And he repeatedly formulates his conviction: “There is no History with a capital H, only small stories. If there is one thing I can say – and have already said – it is that there are only human beings and scoundrels.” The book thus raises a memorial column to the father – to the man.

In any future volume that undertakes a more detailed analysis of the oeuvre of this writer – who became famous through his “dictionary novel” – a richly structured index would assist orientation, including numerous key concepts, motifs, names and titles. As an example, let a brief selection suffice here: affection, America, American English, Amsterdam, anecdote, aphorism, autobiography, Babonáskönyv (lit. Book of Superstitions), friend, Béla Bartók, Sándor Bálint [Hungarian ethnographer and scholar of folk religion], beat, chess, Chinese language, Tibor Déry, document, drink, Egyetemi Könyvtár (University Library), Életrajzoló (Biographer), the English language, family, family novel, father, feuilleton, Fiatal Művészek Klubja (lit. The Young Artists’ Club), film-novel, García Márquez, grandfather, guest-text, Győző, Híd (Bridge), Kornél Hidi, history, Hungary, Hungarian identity, intertextuality, irony, Katalin, Katlan (Cauldron), Királyáldozat (lit. The King’s Sacrifice), Kölcsön idő (Borrowed Time), Lélekrajzoló (Soul-portraitist), the “little man”, love, montage, mosaic, mother, music, novel-newspaper, Pejote, Pest, play, Por (Dust), Porlód, postmodernism, province, police novel, short story, Szeged, András Szeles, sex, stratagems, Szótáríró (Dictionary Writer), tale, Gábor Tamási, Tarot, Tenacatita, Zoltán Tengődi, the Tisza, Pál Tóth, István Tömörkény, travel, Vera Villám, wife, István Zoltán, István Zoltánfy, 30 November 1949, 1956, 30 June 1973, 11 April 1983, the “48–56” piano.

[the order of the original, Hungarian-language entries has been changed in favour of the English-language alphabetical order]

[2013]

Ferenc Temesi

Selection of works