2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Budapest mid-20c: a mixed bag of stories, November 9, 2005
This review is from: Love and Other Stories (Paperback)
George Szirtes in his introduction raises as many questions as he answers about this purportedly Chekhovian Hungarian writer (1897-1977). Dery's persistent if rather cloaked versions of socialist realism, stemming from his Communist Party affiliations that predated the "red terror" of the Bela Kun soviet that briefly took over Hungary in 1919, do mask whatever Dery deeper down might have come to feel about the regime that liberated his nation from the Nazi and Arrow Cross fascism that he describes well in his vignettes near and of the end of WW2. I wonder what Dery wanted to write rather than what he was allowed to publish in the subsequent totalitarian regime. Dissent peeks out slightly, but is allowable if against discredited former regimes or occupiers, not the present ones.
A knowledge of modern Hungarian history is needed to fully appreciate some of the stories. The Rakosi, pre-1956, Stalin-aligned rulers are denigrated energetically by characters; the sacrifice of a professor who gets to the border after the failed rebellion and chooses to freeze to death rather than cross over into Austria and presumably betrayal of his homeland make for intriguing, if ultimately rather too oblique commentary that nonetheless remains rare for English readers of fiction. Dery's stories of the siege of Budapest and the coming of the Russians, as Szirtes notes, appeared in 1946, two years before the Communist takeover and within a time when a multiparty coalition seemed still likely. Dery does stumble: his Russian soldier who signals the war's end has "laughing blue eyes"; the Aunt Anna who dies heroically has a lingering and lengthy speech of proleteriat defiance that is simply as unbelievable as it is unrealistic. The fidelity, then, to whatever Communist principles inspired Dery long before, during, and after WW2 make for an uneven array of stories.
Those linked about a collection of folks struggling under Budapest to survive the Nazi retreat and the Allied bombings make for reading that rewards--a horse brought in to survive while soldiers' corpses decay above, the bickering of bodies too long pressed together, the ideological tension as those on the fascist side contend below with those welcoming the Russians all add up to more vignettes than fully-fledged fiction, but still valuable records of the time.
The strongest, most literary efforts, "Love" and "Two Women," show Dery's ability to eschew agitprop for conventional stories, and even these hint marvellously at deeper political meanings. "The Circus" becomes a bold and moving allegory in this same fashion. Socialist realism in "Behind the Brick Wall," however, failed to move me at all; the details of survival in "Reckoning" among the refugees escaping in late 1956 as winter descended inspired me to continue the story despite its awkward narrative, compressed perhaps again by the ideological constraints under which Dery would have produced his work under the post-rebellion Kadar-ruled state. Finally, "Philemon & Baucis" failed to rise from the pages.
It is difficult to find many competent and fluent translators of an incredibly complex language of 10 million as well as English, and the quality of the various renderings differs. Some make the lower classes speak as if Cockney, some as if Southern American, slightly twisted. The tone, therefore, differs from story to story, and this may have added to the uneven nature of the fiction that is assembled here in translation. I do not know if Dery truly enjoyed writing; I get some sense that he felt he had to do so, but that he did not do so "naturally."
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
