I kept plugging away at this book out of admiration, not enjoyment. ( )

My neighbor Randy owns the only bookstore in our city. Many would regard this as an asset. First meet him and then hazard a guess. Unctuous and opportunistic, he is leading an involunatry campaign against localism and he doesn't even know. Well he pegged this once correctly. He thought I'd like it and I did. Tranquility doesn't flinch. The sorrows of fractured family float in lasting exhibition. ( )

Tranquility is anything but. This is an intense novel about a writer and his mixed up life. It gets racy, it gets emotionally violent, it has moments of pure insanity, but it is very, very good at all that it does. I was often finding myself drawn deeply into the emotion of the main character, the author who is dealing with his elderly, nutty actress-mother and his love life that has gone awry because of said mother and his living conditions with her. You don't have to have experienced what the narrator has experienced in order to become emotionally attached to what has happened to him because of the wonderful way this book is written.

The plot jumps around a lot and there were times when I felt somewhat lost as to where I had stopped reading. Several times I found myself wondering if my bookmark slipped and was put back in a different page than I remembered, either because the words I were reading felt like exact copies of what I had read before or because I felt so totally lost between what had happened and what was happening that I feared I'd skipped some pages. This writing style is part of the charm of the book, however and after a time you become used to it for the most part, though I wouldn't say it was my favorite aspect of the story.

People unwilling to read about intense sexual situations should probably avoid this book, as there are interactions with prostitutes, lovers and the narrator's mother that can become quite graphic at times. However, if that is your only reason to avoid reading, you might want to blush your way through the meat of the story because the emotional journey of the book combined with the quality of the writing shouldn't be missed. ( )

I believe that this is the Hungarian author’s first novel to be translated into English; and what a novel it is! There are many comparisons mentioned on the back of the book: Thomas Bernhard, Elfriede Jelinek, Strindbberg, Checkhov, Beckett, Camus, Sartre, Kundera, and Andrzej Stasiuk. I cannot understand the Beckett comparison, except for one very small scene late in the book. The comparison to Camus is probably related to the apathetic announcement of the mother’s death, in the opening of the novel (similar to “The Stranger”), but otherwise I don’t get the comparison. The comparison I would most agree with is Kundera, with the sex, and politics, etc.

I’ll just say that this is about a writer, living with his aging ex-actress insane mother, and their past. Wrought with imaginative similes and beautiful/absurd imaginings, this is a novel to be reckoned with.

I will just summarize with a paragraph from page 232 that really stood out for me about freedom.

“Whatever I know of freedom, I learned when I parted with Mrs. Berenyi and headed for Kalvin Square. If, by freedom we don’t mean the euphoria of test pilots or the right to vote or that we may judge and decide according to our moral standards, and our decision happens to coincide with our most secret desires and emotions. If freedom is not white paper with black ink on it; if it is not four taut strings or ten thousand organ pipes; if it is not a hermit’s cave and it isn’t the moment when God’s prop alarm clock stops and something bursts the ribcage. In short, it’s best if we imagine that freedom is the kind of condition in which nothing ties us to the world around us. We have no desires, passions, or fears, we might say neither aims nor aimlessness, and we even fail to register that this vacuum no longer bothers us. Freedom is an odd, mainly characterless condition. It has nothing to do with indifference, which is inevitably cynical, and it has nothing to do with a state of it-all-comes-down-to-the-same-thing because behind that state still lurks some shame or hope. If everything comes to the same thing, that’s still very human. I might put it this way: freedom is a condition unsuitable for humans.” ( )

This is a squalid, obscene, continuously dark story of a disturbed family. There are abyssal moments of perversion, neurosis, psychosis, and delusion that can also be found in many sentimental North American novels of the sort publicized by Oprah, but this book is different. The Romanian-born Hungarian author is very much of his time and place: there is mordant black humor (made familiar in the West in Kundera, but more akin to the sharper postmodern humor in contemporary Czech writing like Viewegh's); routine admissions of debilitating moral weakness (in the end, an inheritance of Beckett); eastern-European style surrealism (a whore with twenty birds, who also poisons birds in her spare time); compulsively disgusting inventories of bodily fluids (lots of stains, smells, and sticky fingers); a remnant of Soviet-era paranoia and disaffection about government and the church; and a post-structural dedication to a lack of progress or any passing melioration (the character never really tries to understand himself). In short: no American sentimentality, and no American moral for self-improvement. In that, Bartis is more like A.L. Kennedy than any best seller.

If there's a problem with the book, I think it is momentum. It is clear that Bartis had the rudiments of a plot--a priest, introduced near the beginning, comes back in the end, and so forth. But after a while there is not much impetus to turn the page, other than to find one of the scattered dead-end epiphanies that structure the book. The character doesn't change, even though his only real love affair is the book's central event; and it's clear Bartis wrote this in a series of dissociated one-page bursts. Some of them read like prose poems, and they are all separated by asterisms. So the book keeps starting and stopping. That, and the unrelieved gloom, must be the reasons Rivka Galchen describes it as "even Endgame-ish" on the back cover: it is less like Beckett than "Naked Lunch."

Another difficulty is that Bartis apparently counts on his readers to feel a strange elation when he confronts them with unspeakable horrors. That elation is apparently meant to include a bit of laughter: we are shocked, we shiver and laugh, and then we take some comfort in having looked, at least for a moment, into something genuinely lightless. The main character has spent fifteen years living at home with his reclusive mother after his sister abandoned them; his mother had actually bought a plot in the cemetery and held a mock funeral in which she buried her daughter's things. The son goes on pretending that his sister is sending their mother letters--he writes the letters himself--and the mother gives the son letters to post to the sister. Toward the end of the book it turns out that all the mother's letters were blank: she knew, all along, that the son was writing letters supposedly from the sister. As this story is revealed, we are meant to be shocked and amused, and take some small and disreputable pleasure in knowing we have now experienced, even if only through an undependable narrator in a novel, something really repellent about human nature. But what if these effects don't work? What if I don't laugh? What if I'm not shocked? What if I begin to feel that the plot devices are too garish, too artificial, too deliberately disturbing? What if I start wishing I were re-reading "Molloy" or "The Unnamable" instead? What if I begin to wish that Bartis felt he could communicate certain depths without pinpricks, spilled fluids, psychotic breaks, and new categories of squalor?

In the end, for me, this book is a bit trapped in the heritage of eastern European realism and surrealism. I will read something else of his, but only if it seems he has found a way to turn the volume down.

(It's true that the book entirely deserves the translation prize. There are virtually no missteps and a large number of felicitous turns of phrase that seem entirely appropriate, don't take me out of the narrative, and yet seem like brilliant inventions on the part of the translator.) ( )