Saturday 'Stache: Nelio Biedermann

Fabulous is the word for this twisted modern fairy tale -- both as a compliment and in the sense of full of fables. Nelio Biedermann is only 22 and descends from Hungarian nobility. His grandparents fled to Switzerland in the 1950s, and he draws on Romantic-era novels as well as his family history to craft a compelling, accessible continental melodrama.

The 20th century is closing in on the blue-blooded Von Lazars, who live in a grand house on the edge of a deep, dark Hungarian forest. There is the baron, a cruel and punctilious patriarch, and his wife, a compulsive liar who cuts herself with her husband’s razor blade. The central character is their son, Lajos, born in 1900 on the evening of Epiphany. 

Blond, blue-eyed and “jellyfish-skinned,” he looks suspiciously unlike the baron. Also in the house are Lajos’s six-year-old sister, who is “not at all happy” about his birth, and their uncle, seemingly driven to madness after reading a gothic short story collection and locked away when a photographer comes around. None of this is a spoiler -- Biedermann sets everything up in the first 20 pages with a quiet feat of compression.

We follow the unhappy family across three generations, from the last gasp of the Habsburg Empire and its collapse after the First World War to the rise of Nazism and the thwarted 1956 Hungarian uprising against the Soviet Union.

Laid out like this, the novel sounds like a baroque slog, but Biedermann writes with brevity and gives his characters enough life to shine through the gloom. Take Lajos’s charismatic, Proust-loving chaplain, who instinctively thanks the Lord for “the carpets of snowdrops, daisies and primroses,” even as German troops invade Belgium.

Jamie Bulloch’s slick translation invites further comparison with Proust by paraphrasing the opening lines of “Swann’s Way”: “For a long time he used to go to bed early…” Biedermann admires Proust’s high-society aestheticism but wants to smash it into the darkest decades of modern Europe. His novel wants it both ways -- the Gestapo and the haunted forest -- and he doesn’t always pull it off.

The author adopts a bleak Mitteleuropean cynicism beyond his years. Childbirth is almost invariably a catastrophe for his characters (not unfitting for a novel set in the Freudian age). When the baron and, eventually, Lajos become parents, they in turn fantasize about murdering the baby to return to their earlier lives.

Meanwhile, most of Biedermann’s aristocrats seem powerless to stop themselves from having affairs. In his distilled style, however, these affairs ignite with as little as “a tender smile.” For every major historical event, the book makes another concession to fantasy.

There are less dusty influences on show, too. The shades of magical realism speak for themselves, but Biedermann’s edgy, sinister sex scenes feel contemporary. A boy encounters his parents forming the beast with two backs, a hellish image: “mechanical and compulsive, it thrusts the sword into its own flesh.” Candles are used for both gratification and abuse.

“Lazar” may be severe by English-speaking standards, but it is deft and pleasurable, too. To pull off this kind of balancing act on a first attempt is impressive.

Article by James Riding