Not Art: A Novel [Paperback]

Peter Esterhazy (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 16, 2010

′I WILL WRITE ABOUT ALL THAT IN MORE DETAIL LATER.′

The final sentence of Helping Verbs of the Heart - was it a promise, a threat, a quote? In 1985, when Péter Esterházy′s book came out on unnumbered, black-edged pages, this much-cited sentence seemed most likely to be the manifestation of authorial posturing. After the publication of his books on his father Celestial Harmonies and Revised Edition, this sentence and the preceding book on his mother′s death, broken up into auxiliary verbs, now gain new meaning twenty-three years later in Not Art.

Not Art is the book of the reawakened mother, a mother who knows the offside rule, and whose language, which determines her relationship to the world, is the language of football. The son only exists in relation to it, just as everything and everyone else only exists in relation to this mother′s football language. Football, in the author′s last book a stage and a medium for private historiography, now acts as a worldview, its roots in his relationship to his mother and his mother tongue: a mother′s language complex.

Readers seeking ′family stories′ will find them - in subtly written, rounded stories. Those looking for emotions will find them too: platonic love, marital love filled with tenderness, and of course love for his mother and father. And those interested in the esterházyesque auto-reflexive textual world (where does the author begin and end) will not be disappointed either. Irony, beauty, history, the Magnificent Magyars, father, grandmother, aunt, uncle, mother, life and death, especially death, but beautifully written. And life too, of course, which comes before death.

′My mother talked her way through the entire sixties and seventies in French. Boy, even comrade sounds bearable in French. She slipped into the French language as if into a bunker. No, a bunker would be more German, concrete protection; language is a lighter form of asylum, if danger were ahead it would provide no protection, a hiding place, a hideout, a wing under which one cannot shelter. Whenever she left French she immediately moved into football. One might say my mother was on the run her whole life long. And one might also say that she was happy her whole life long.′

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

A great deal feels lost in translation in acclaimed Hungarian author Esterházy's collection of vignettes about the soccer-obsessed mother of an Esterházy-like author. From the very first sentence (it's footnoted) through meta-asides along the lines of My mother spoke French like my father did in my novels (if he happened to be speaking French) and a chapter near the end consisting of enigmatic epigrams spoken to or by the author (You are emotionally unpretentious. [You, dear, are emotionally unpretentious.] Who, me? [Me?]), the cloying self-references drain what little dramatic tension the largely momentum-free narrative builds. The anecdotes, monologues, and memories that constitute the work progress in apparently random order, although most have to do with the mother, who interprets the world through soccer. The footnotes about soccer and Hungarian history are refreshingly concise, and some early passages contain interesting details about life in Communist Hungary. Once in a while, Esterházy's style and subject matter spark a stray profundity, but this rambling, pretentious book will leave readers wondering what the point is. (Mar.)
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From Booklist

This slim volume serves as a follow up to the Hungarian author’s much earlier Helping Verbs of the Heart (1991). The protagonist’s mother loves football (soccer), not in a normal way but in an all-encompassing way, which shapes her relationship with not only her son but the rest of the world as well. The family story of love, football, and post-war Europe has a metafiction feel and the reader is never quite clear if it’s a memoir or novel. The translator’s footnotes add to the confusion. A fine edition to an international fiction collection, but perhaps not for the casual reader. --Marta Segal Block

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Product Details

• Paperback: 240 pages
• Publisher: Ecco; 1 edition (February 16, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0061792969
• ISBN-13: 978-0061792960
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.3 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,944,186 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars fascinating biographical fiction, February 27, 2010

By 

Harriet Klausner - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Not Art: A Novel (Paperback)

In Budapest, the narrator knows his nonagenarian mom is ill, but still retains her incredible lust for living life to the fullest. He looks back over the decades to his childhood and early adulthood playing soccer. He recalls the Communist abuse towards his family due to their surname and his vivacious mom used soccer for her and her family to overcome the brutality from the State. She befriended the Hungarian players even knowing that at least one member of the team was an informant because that was a way of life under the Communists.

This is an odd well written but difficult to follow drama that reads sort of like a series of vignettes that tie together as a biographical fiction. The narrator looks back on his life and the most influential person in it over the decades, his mom and her life as helped her family survive the brutal regime through her soccer connections. Told in twelve short stories, Not Art is for fans of something totally different as Peter Esterhazy provides a deep look at Hungary under Communist rule and beyond through apparently a glimpse into his family history inside of the bigger soccer field.

Harriet Klausner

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A little bit like Proust meets Philip Roth, March 5, 2010

By 

C. Kearns - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Not Art: A Novel (Paperback)

First, and to some most importantly, the writing in this book 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. It's records the narrator's memories of the day-to-day life in communist Hungary, but I found there were moments of real terror throughout. 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.