“Lázár” moves quickly, scarcely leaving readers time to settle into one moment before whisking them off to the next. How else could it race through the most eventful half century of European history in fewer than three hundred pages? Before long, the First World War is over, and Ilona and Lajos are adults. Ilona marries the heir to a Jewish banking fortune (we can already see what is coming); Lajos’s wife, Lilly, is the daughter of a wealthy businessman. Soon after their honeymoon, we see Lajos and Lilly with children of their own: Pista, a troubled boy who talks to the shadows in the yard, and Eva, a baby too young to bother endowing with a personality.
Biedermann has a magical-realist streak, and “Lázár” is forever sprouting lightly supernatural subplots. Peasants whisper about monsters in the forest, and in the interlude between the wars, Lajos gazes at a house that is burning down and has a premonition of the world-historical destruction to come. There are a number of overblown sexual intrigues—Mária with the groom, Sándor with a factory worker in the city, Lajos with a maid, Ilona with one of her tutors—but for the most part the book’s story is just the well-rehearsed story of the twentieth century. Hitler comes to power; Lajos, by now a regional administrator, reluctantly carries out the Nazis’ orders, consigning the local Jewish population to death; Ilona and her husband flee to America by way of Switzerland. The war ends, and marauding Russians confiscate the family estate. The Lázárs work on a farm, then move to a cramped apartment in Budapest and take menial jobs in the mines and the post office. In the final scene of the book, Eva and Pista make their way over the Swiss border to freedom, as Biedermann’s grandparents did.
All this is so familiar that reading “Lázár” is like visiting a museum of older novels. The scenes in which Russian invaders ravage rural Hungary might have come from “All for Nothing,” Walter Kempowski’s 2006 masterpiece about the Eastern Front; the scenes in which Lajos mocks Ilona for fretting so anxiously about Hitler might have come from “The Oppermanns,” Lion Feuchtwanger’s 1933 portrait of a Jewish family who cannot decide whether to leave Berlin as Nazism intensifies. Biedermann’s Communist Budapest is a kind of composite of the cities depicted in Eastern European novels about life under Communism, like Bohumil Hrabal’s Prague in the riotous 1976 novella “Too Loud a Solitude” or Ivan Klíma’s Prague in “Love and Garbage” (1986). In one scene early in “Lázár,” Ilona lies in her room at the family summer house, luxuriating in the sense that time has stalled. “Whenever she lay in bed like this, everything was like the year before,” Biedermann writes. “Lázár” invites us to lie in bed—and relish the fantasy that everything is as it was the century before. We have only to look outside to see a mythic Austria-Hungary restored.
The book’s ambivalent nostalgia has not kept it from succeeding prodigiously. On the contrary, “Lázár” has topped the German best-seller list for twenty-nine weeks and is set to be translated into more than twenty-five languages. Naturally, Tom Tykwer, co-creator of the prestige period drama series “Babylon Berlin,” is planning to adapt it into a movie. Indeed, the novel’s antiquated air is the basis of its somewhat chintzy appeal: “People found it interesting that the book is stylistically, linguistically old-fashioned,” Biedermann told an interviewer at the New York Times. He wrote it by hand. I was almost surprised he didn’t use a quill.
For what, in the end, could be quainter than Biedermann himself? He joins a vaunted tradition of wunderkinder, mythologized at least as much for their precocity as for their actual work. The writer Novalis was well established as one of the brightest lights of German Romanticism when he died at twenty-eight, and Thomas Mann began the astonishing “Buddenbrooks” (1901) at the age of twenty-two and finished it three years later. The inevitable Mann comparisons arrived on schedule. In the Süddeutsche Zeitung, a reviewer wrote of Biedermann (in my translation), “One might think, good God, is he the new Thomas Mann, and are the Lázárs his Buddenbrooks?”
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