The Hungarian Quarterly, 2008 (49. évfolyam, 190. szám)

BOOKS AND AUTHORS - Webb, W. L.: The Magical Gone Wrong (Gyula Krúdy)

W.L. Webb The Magical Gone Wrong Gyula Krúdy: Ladies Day (Asszonyságok díja), translated by John Batki. Budapest, Corvina Press, 2007, 190 pp. H ungary's conflicted history—its shifting frontiers, drastic amputations of territory and population—has produced, George Szirtes suggests, a particular reaction in Hungarian writing—"an interest in the grotesque, the black joke, the magical gone wrong [my italics]". That last thought might have been written—perhaps was written—with Gyula Krúdy's extraordinary fictions especially in mind. Even more than Sunflower, the novel which immediately preceded it, Ladies Day, now available in John Batki's American-English translation, is shot through with a queer magic, a disturbed energy of language, character and situation for which it’s hard to think of a parallel, in the Anglo-Saxon literatures, at least. One can perhaps find echoes of that disturbed magic in some of the writing of near-contemporary writers in parts of East Central Europe that had been subjected to the same sort of historical tribulations. Think, for instance, of the less robust, more painfully haunted imaginative world of Bruno Schulz, disclosed in The Street of Crocodiles, his bewitched, obsessional drawings, and the strangely-lit stories of Cinnamon Shops. Schulz and Krúdy have other things in common, too: the shaman's gift of metamorphosis, and some interest in fetishistic humiliation, got from the work of Leopold Sacher-Masoch, so fashionably influential in Austro-Hungarian cultural milieux of the early twentieth century. (Hungarian may be the 'orphan language' John Lukacs calls it, but its writers were not, after all, excluded from the cultural family of the Empire and Central Europe generally.) M emory tells me that Sunflower, first published in 1918, a year earlier than Ladies Day, is the more shapely of the two novels. Ladies Day too has its lyrical pastoral passages, but these are visitations in reverie; the backward-looking Hungarian countryside of the late nineteenth century is not where it lives and breathes. This is a city novel, full of urban rough and tumble, its people—and its author—still nostalgic for the byways and habits of an older town, but aware that the Budapest in which it was written was now a city in the new world of the twentieth century. W. L. Webb wrote about literature and politics for the Guardian for more than 30 years, and was subsequently a research fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford. He has edited An Embarrassment of Tyrannies (Gollancz, 1997) from the work of the magazine Index on Censorship. 134 The Hungarian Quarterly

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