The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Tranquility, by Attila Bartis
Reviewed by Michael Pinker

Untitled document

Trans. Imre Goldstein. Archipelago Books, 2008. 292 pp. Paper: $15.00.

Andor Weér lives with his mother, Rebeka, a well-regarded stage actress who nearly twenty years before had been informed by the communist authorities that she would no longer play leading roles after her virtuoso daughter, Judit, Andor’s twin, fled the country with little more than her violin. Rebeka never leaves her Budapest apartment again, becoming a parasitical nuisance to her strangely conflicted son. Andor pretends to write letters to Judit—presumably traveling the world giving recitals—to satisfy his mother, who pretends to write back. Their deceitful, nagging misalliance launches a series of abrupt, highly charged conjunctions of live situations and elaborate fantasies (called dreams or thoughts) through which Andor elaborates his increasing disaffection as the Iron Curtain collapses around him. Andor has also been scribbling stories on scraps of paper, hardly taking them seriously. When he meets Eszter, a fetching Romanian without a past, and they hit it off, she sets to typing her lover’s fugitive works and finds him a publisher. Yet calling upon his new editor entangles Andor in crude sexual trysts with this woman nearly old enough to be his mother, whom he later learns was his father’s mistress when that shadowy figure, now presumed dead, was an agent of the secret police. A complex web binds Andor to each of these women as the plot winds around itself like a topological map, the permutations of so many shifting relations devolving into erotic excess, coarse couplings, and coarser language. Ultimately Andor’s love for Eszter yields to doubts about her past, while revelations about his father and mother leave him to dwell upon the extent of his and others’ subterfuges, and the boundaries between his dreaming and waking life blur. Anything but tranquil, Bartis’s disturbing novel portrays the dissolution of loyalties by examining their raw, clinical detritus.


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction Tranquility, by Attila Bartis Reviewed by Michael Pinker Untitled document Trans. Imre Goldstein. Archipelago Books, 2008. 292 pp. Paper: $15.00. Andor Weér lives with his mother, Rebeka, a well-regarded stage actress who nearly twenty years before had been informed by the communist authorities that she would no longer play leading roles after her virtuoso daughter, Judit, Andor’s twin, fled the country with little more than her violin. Rebeka never leaves her Budapest apartment again, becoming a parasitical nuisance to her strangely conflicted son. Andor pretends to write letters to Judit—presumably traveling the world giving recitals—to satisfy his mother, who pretends to write back. Their deceitful, nagging misalliance launches a series of abrupt, highly charged conjunctions of live situations and elaborate fantasies (called dreams or thoughts) through which Andor elaborates his increasing disaffection as the Iron Curtain collapses around him. Andor has also been scribbling stories on scraps of paper, hardly taking them seriously. When he meets Eszter, a fetching Romanian without a past, and they hit it off, she sets to typing her lover’s fugitive works and finds him a publisher. Yet calling upon his new editor entangles Andor in crude sexual trysts with this woman nearly old enough to be his mother, whom he later learns was his father’s mistress when that shadowy figure, now presumed dead, was an agent of the secret police. A complex web binds Andor to each of these women as the plot winds around itself like a topological map, the permutations of so many shifting relations devolving into erotic excess, coarse couplings, and coarser language. Ultimately Andor’s love for Eszter yields to doubts about her past, while revelations about his father and mother leave him to dwell upon the extent of his and others’ subterfuges, and the boundaries between his dreaming and waking life blur. Anything but tranquil, Bartis’s disturbing novel portrays the dissolution of loyalties by examining their raw, clinical detritus.

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