Customer Reviews

Skylark (Central European Classics)

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I generally agree with what the previous reviewer has stated, although I found this short novel (as well as Anna Edes) brilliant and almost totally flawless. A book which I didn't want to finish simply because I truly enjoyed the experience of reading it.

This is an unusually fine short novel which conveys the spirit of life in small town Hungary at the turn of the 19th-20th centuries. If you are unsure where to start with Kosztolanyi, I would read Skylark first and then move on to Anna Edes or his short fiction.

I found out about this little gem through Deborah Eisenberg's review in The New York Review of Books and would send anyone interested to that website for her own eloquent praise. "A perfect novel," she called it, and not only writes extensively and effusively about it but submits to an online interview in its cause.

There is originality in the conception and plot of the novel, wonderful descriptive passages, and, even rarer, an unremitting honesty in the author's treatment of his characters. We are not allowed to look down from a distant perch at these small-town, constrained people with their modest and circumscribed lives, nor, as they become close and vivid to us, are they elevated to heroic or even special status. Kosztolanyi avoids the formulae of tragedy, pathos, and (despite the chapter headings and humor) farce, nor is he content to serve up social science, fraught with self-justifying psychological and sociological descriptions. We are presented with an account that invokes all those genres, but finally is a synthesis, is nuanced and fully, compassionately human.

I would leave it to Ms Eisenberg to provide more detail than that, but having great esteem for her own short stories, I myself didn't require it. Every line of this slender volume counts, and to describe it overmuch seems almost beside the point.

There is nothing earth-shattering about this novel except the unusual clarity of Kosztolányi's descriptive powers. More so than the novel Anna Édes, however, Skylark puts a burden of thought onto the reader. Kosztolányi only narrates, offering no judgements or opinions, and so his narration is very focused. The translation preserves this and is generally praiseworthy; Kosztolányi's characteristic terse, direct style and colorful phrasing come through unscathed.

This edition has a nice 10 page introduction by Péter Esterházy, which gives interesting information about the author as well as some background information about Hungarian literature. The cover and binding are, in my opinion, quite handsome also.

This deceptively unsettling novel tells the story of the Vajkay family over one week in September 1899. The Vajkays live, in almost cloistered fashion, in Sárszeg, a backwater town in the grandiose Austro-Hungarian Empire of Franz Joseph and the Habsburgs. Father Ákos is fifty-nine, a retired archivist; mother Antónia is fifty-seven; and daughter Skylark (one of the most incongruously named characters in fiction) is thirty-five. She dotes on her parents, and in truth they are all she has, because she is -- there is no other word for it -- ugly.

The family's inveterate routine is interrupted when Skylark goes to stay with relatives on the plains for a week. Because Skylark had done all the cooking, Father and Mother have to eat out, at the King of Hungary restaurant. There they meet old acquaintances and they are drawn out of their shells into the provincial social life of Sárszeg, including a night at the theater and, for Father, eating and drinking with the Panthers, the local club of bon vivants. Father and Mother are rejuvenated, at least temporarily. But then it is time for Skylark to return. Was she, too, re-invigorated over that week? Does she have any new prospects for marriage? Or do things return to the way they were?

From that outline SKYLARK might sound like pretty mundane fare. But Dezso Kosztolányi, one of the leading Hungarian writers of his time, makes of it a very engaging light novel, alternately funny and poignant. The writing is brisk, deft, and assured.

On one level SKYLARK is a superb portrayal of the bourgeoisie of provincial Kakania, a keen yet gentle satire of their smug but gormless existence. For example, the only two subjects Ákos Vajkay enjoys reading about are the genealogies of Hungarian nobility and the history of coats of arms; every evening before going to bed he checks behind the furniture and in the wardrobes to see if anyone is hiding there; the show-stopping number during their theater night of culture, a performance of "The Geisha", is a vaudeville song ending "Chin Chin Chinaman, Chop, Chop, Chop!"

At the same time, it depicts the proper and correct - but oh so achingly empty - life of the Vajkays. "Skylark", indeed. The ending is ineffably sad. And death hovers over everyone.

Although written in 1924, SKYLARK is not at all dated. And although set in provincial Kakania, it has a universal import.

A wonderful book. Very well written. Sad and funny. A fast wonderful read.

The novel is set in a small burg (the author's hometown) in Austro- Hungarian Empire. The narrative is about how Vajkays, an elderly couple, spend their week when their daughter is away. Chapter I " in which the reader is introduced to an elderly couple and their daughter, the apple of their eye, and hears of complicated preparations for a trip to the plains." sets the tone for the novel.

And, how do Mother and Father negotiate the week without the `apple of their eye'. Interestingly, life is lively for the two as " the Vajkays attend the Sarszeg performance of The Geisha", "the couple talk to a fledgling poet." Of course, Father reconnects to Panthers' Table which was formed ...."with not unworthy aim of popularizing consumption of alcohol and promoting gentlemanly friendship. " At home, Mother plays the piano which was shut a long long time ago.

Mother and Father become a part of the liveliness the small burg can afford not as a rebellion against their daughter. For Skylark, their daughter is caring, devoted though domineering . Nor are they seeking escape in her absence from the seclusion enjoined on them and ugly looking Skylark. They are drawn into this lively world due to circumstances beyond their control. They hesitate to accept that they relish some of the things they did. Somewhere also they feel a sense of guilt. This tension brings them to express the hidden feelings towards the daughter. The author beautifully explains the Chapter for this event "in which, after several years in the making, the great day of reckoning finally arrives, and our heroes receive from life the solace and just deserts that come to each and every one of us."

What happens when Skylark returns? Do things come back to normal? What has Skylark gone through? Does the relationship change between the daughter and parents? The author closes the novel in Chapter- XIII "in which, on the eight of September 1899, the novel is concluded, without coming to an end." As in real life there is no ending to the ordinariness and the routineness in our life.

Skylark is a beautiful novel which explores our day to day relationships and brings out the ordinariness that pervades it. But, in a lovable way. It also makes one think -Is there no escape from the ordinariness life? What if one tries to escape? Will it not break the equilibrium of the relationships? Does one need to escape? It brings hope where there is none. It does so with a lot of humour.

The novel is timeless and universal as even today after 80 years when the novel was written. In each character we can see ourselves and those we know.

I loved the novel for its simplicity when I read it first. When I read it again, the complexity of relationships unfolded and I loved it even more. Now, after reading Deborah Eisenberg's insightful review in the New York Review of Books, I am going to read it again.

It is truly a perfect and lovable novel.

PS: Can't help saying the Cover is beautifully apt.

The plot of this novel is simple: Skylark, unmarried and not employed other than in the domestic arrangements of her family home, is persuaded to spend a week with relatives, leaving her ageing parents to fend for themselves. Freed from the stranglehold of her management and prejudices, they dine in restaurants, visit the theatre, stay up all night, and in the last hours before meeting Skylark at the train station scramble to return everything to its place and destroy all evidence of the high life they have led. It's a nice reversal of the more familiar situation of the young running to wild excess whilst parents are away.

Events are firmly anchored in time and place: the week from Friday 1st to Friday 8th September 1899 in the Hungarian town of Sárszeg, a fictionalized form of Subotica, the author's place of birth. By the time Skylark was written (first published 1924), the "war to end all wars" had swept away the easy-going, optimistic way of life described. Gone too was the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and Hungary had been deprived of two-thirds of its territory. Subotica had been attached to Serbia, a part of Yugoslavia. Skylark is a warts and all but very loving portrait of life in Hungary's second largest town in the last years before the cataclysm.

The closing pages of the book draw us into reflecting that although the triangular family relationship has been restored, it cannot be indefinitely sustained. Neither was Mother and Father's binge sustainable. Nor was it desirable that the life of the town as described should be sustained for ever, even if that were possible. Yet the new order that replaced it could hardly be said to have been better, and the conflagration of transition from the old to the new (of which we pick up just a hint in the narrative) was immeasurably worse. A relatively easy read of less than 60,000 words, this is a thought provoking novel.

I cannot praise this book too highly. For a story in which hardly anything happens, it is full of surprises, starting with the title, which is misleading in two ways: the book ignores Skylark for most of its length (although it is surely all about her in a sense), and she is the antithesis of a skylark. But the biggest surprise is the power of the narrative. I admit that I began to wonder about midway why I was still reading the book since, as I say, nothing seemed to be happening. But in the book's latter part the sheer depth of feelings began to become paramount, and the purpose of it all became clearer and clearer, culminating in a drama that was almost unbearable.

The book is amazing also for its gentleness despite great emotional turmoil, for that turmoil arising from the everyday, for its balancing of the stripping away of all pretense with the purest love, and for its ordinary yet devastating finale. I suppose different readers will take away different things from this book, some even seeing a vindication of the title. But for this reader it seems almost absurd that I should be commending the book to anyone, since -- aside from the joy of reading good writing -- it has left me with a reaffirmation of life's awfulness. But I am used to the idea that there is at least this kind of consolation to be had from life: that from its awfulness sometimes comes great art.

By the way, one nice little touch (among many): I believe one of the minor characters must represent the author, who inserts himself in a clever, even droll, way.

This book was very good. It is on a topic not that often addressed, yet everyone knows someone like this woman. I recommend it. I thought about it for days after reading it.