The great Hungarian narrator died on Thursday in Budapest. He has the story of his family and his country together with the migration of European literature.
It was important to him, for this book launch to come back to Berlin. In early April sat Péter Esterházy in the great hall of the Academy of Arts on Pariser Platz and read from the German translation of his last book, “The Mark Version. Simple story comma hundred pages”. The book is built around an ego around – it starts with his birth – to his family, to the growth and ingrowth in stories and in writing. This ego, which says of himself, it had rather pray than to talk, grows in the text of Mark into it, and slides at the end in an unprecedented move, the first person singular in the Passion story in: “But I cried a loud voice, . And the veil of the temple was torn in Zwey piece, from top to the bottom. “
in the Hungarian original is” the Mark version “published in 2014, may be that because the cancer that Péter Esterházy in November 2015 publicly made, nor was the future. In April 2016 she was to see him, but she had the serenity that surrounded him, not destroyed. He had brought them to Berlin, it was to listen to his voice when he spoke about the ego, which he had just read. This serenity of person Péter Esterházy had its counterpart in the factory, in the language beats over the traces, hook kicks, prances, feints faking and is not afraid to occasionally the Lord God, “who can solely with itself”, under classified the comic characters.
“the 20th century is the century of dictatorships and the language of the dictatorship is the silence, the deadly endless silence.”
A few weeks after his last appearance in Berlin Péter Esterházy kept the grave eulogy for his friend Imre Kertész. The words Auschwitz and Holocaust were present in the speech, although they Esterházy aussparte when he spoke of Kertész ‘Art arises from the pain and from the radical nature of its relationship to pain. The language that Kertész had found in “Fateless”, was his response to the deportation to Auschwitz and its survival, the exemption in Birkenau. The irrepressible, boundless, shameless joy that sat Péter Esterházy through his writing in the world, was his response to what he once called “the brutality of reality”. He knew because he was a child of the twentieth century, grew in real socialism, not infrequently he made a joke of it, to feel at home, the touch of idyll from the association area of the Hungarian to pay “goulash communism”. As Péter Esterházy was born in April 1950 in Budapest, as a child of a branch of the old aristocratic family of the in his major work “Celestial Harmonies” (2000), people say they are the Rothschilds of Eastern Europe, was Matyas Rakosi in power. As “the then king of Hungary, student of Stalin, the best in this country,” he haunts clumsily by Esterházys novel “Little Hungarian Pornography”. The novel has its lascivious pages, the obscene is the fact, however, that state and power apparatus using the language as their mistress. “The 20th century is the century of dictatorships,” Esterhazy said in 2006 in his Tübingen poetry lecture, “and the language of the dictatorship is the silence, the deadly, endless silence. What I knew, which was already an improved version or weak version, a soft porn, his language is silence, the silence just from dictatorship, because the weak dictatorship is a dictatorship, it eats the lives of the subjects on. “
About the failed revolution of 1956 was not to be spoken, as Péter Esterházy was since the mid seventies to writers in Hungary. He had studied mathematics and earned electronic data processing his money before he began his great love affair with the Hungarian language. Early popped in his novels a date again and again: The 16 June. It is the day on which James Joyce leaves 1904 hike its Leopold Bloom through Dublin. And it is the day on which in Budapest in 1958 set in the execution of Imre Nagy of the line under the “counter-revolution” by 1956th With this information in mind Péter Esterházy has wanted the language of literature and found that language creates its own order, his mouth can not prohibit and cause havoc with the conventions of storytelling. Already in his early novel “Francsikó and Pinta” (1976) vary the chandelier, photographs are retouched, the shape of the family novel is set on the carousel, the fundamental law of Esterházy world is: “I always come namely from word to word, and not from thought to thought. And at this thought I will come back over the next few days more often. ” This fluctuating letter mocked the directives of socialist realism, kidnapped him his pathos and his idols.
The Verve, took off with the Esterházy to provide an expanding enclave of literary perversity in the socialist state, took off her power Joyce, from the philosophy of language Ludwig Wittgenstein, the great number of possible, out walking in the parlance meanings sat in the place festgezurrter meanings, and especially from the traditions of Central and Eastern European modern literature. He put the allies from far and wide, east and west as a squadron one that flew over the enclave, repeatedly settled in her, in his own texts had guest appearances, while they recorded the substance of family history and the history of Hungary in itself , Peter Handke’s book “A Sorrow” about the suicide of his mother went to the black-rimmed pages of Esterházy book “The auxiliary verbs of the heart” (1985) a, Thomas Bernhard contributed a rant, Dezső Kosztolányi, Bohumil Hrabal and again Danilo Kiš emigrated with . her wit and her horror stories in the books a
the beginning of the novel “Celestial Harmonies” is: “It’s miserable hard to lie when you do not know the truth.”
even before 1989/90 contemporary Hungarian literature in Western Europe had arrived, not least by DAAD programs. Péter Esterházy came in 1980 to West Berlin, which was received in the novels of Peter Nadas, essays by György Konrad contributed to criticism of the bipolar world defined by Yalta and the rediscovery of “Central Europe” in. Esterházy had “Who is responsible for the safety of the Lady” (1982) the hero, a proofreading evaluators sent confusion in a school of (not least sexy) and en passant the cliché of Budapest as eastern Paris pulled in his story through the mud. He was not a man of political essays and manifestos, but the undermining of June 16 in 1958 by 16 June 1904. As then crumbled the postwar order in Europe, including the Soviet Empire and the Warsaw Pact, Esterházy was in the 1990s on his great work, the “Celestial Harmonies” (2001), a baroque monster with baroque title, a mosaic of “numbered sets” about their own family Esterházy. The family novel and the genealogy had played here, and always was uncertain what was the relationship of narrative figures with the empirical members of the author’s family. Now was the first sentence: “. It is miserably hard to lie when you do not know the truth”
The narrative I slide into this European Novel by these names, like a sylph pierces it the boundaries between generations calls father, grandfather, great grandfather, mother, grandmother, great-grandmother to herself, and if there is one, the recurs, then it is the eternal son. He looks down to the time of the Turkish wars, he sees his ancestors in the age of religious wars, he sees them participate and make services Habsburgs European policy on anti-Habsburg rebellions. In ravishing mimicry with the intrigues in the erotic literature of the 18th century Esterházy forfeit from the vicinity of Maria Theresia the “Tango of weakness”. Later scurrying Churchill and the German Emperor Wilhelm II. Through the picture. In Nahblick on the 20th century shattered the great name “Esterházy” in revolution, war and deportation. As Natalia Ginzburg in her “Family Encyclopedia” (1963), from the Esterházy long passages made it his own, he sketches the portrait of the family as a community language. No recognition word, no private linguistic nuance unheeded. But in both cases the Familienidiom remains no private language, it is the polyphonic medium that brings European history to represent.
Yes, here is an ego that is Esterházy himself on the trail, listening to the sound to his name, the echo of the mythology of wealth in money and lands, the flagged castles and fairytale feast. But these “Confessions of a family Esterházy” know not the transfiguring light of nostalgia. The madman here are from the real story, especially the Hungarian, marked: “Once called me a madman and began to tell me the Kádár system had taken root in his mother’s womb, but I should him why not crazy . keep, Oh, iwo! ‘ It sounded pretty believable to. I had already thought that a dictatorship would change the body, it’s grow two noses or webbed fingers. Respectively it was not his mother, but his father. In the intestines his father. that is why this had become a police officer. he fought for the system that had ruined him. “
After the manuscript of” Celestial Harmonies “was completed, learned Péter Esterházy by visiting the” Office story “that his own father has done spying for the government. For copies from this agent dossier and meticulous descriptions of the inner world of the son reading the record of his father, the “Revised Edition” (2002) was created. The improvements included the “Celestial Harmonies”, their father figure now the shadow of the Act fell. In crystal clear, sometimes sarcastic, sometimes grimly comic diction here was an interior view of the turning point, from the language games that literature had departed. “No Art” (2008) called the book, in which once again appears the mother. She is here with another great love of the author, the football, verkuppelt.
And then, as won in Europe in East and West nationalism to ground, Esterházy, the 2004 Peace Prize of the German Book Trade turned had received, once again to the story. His “cloak-and-dagger version” (2013) Hungarian history ran Schalk and imagination of their renewed preparation for Selbstverklärung Hungary in the parade. Then came the “Mark” version, with the final sentence: “.. There is no end This is the final” Then came the illness, then death. Europe has lost a great writer. We mourn.
No comments:
Post a Comment