The Occupation that Never Ends

Long after the final pullout of Soviet troops ended the forty-five-year-long occupation of Hungary, the emotional devastation lived on. In this fiercely told novel—Tranquility, by Attila Bartis, his first work to appear in English—the occupation is an unshakable state of mind.

The narrator, the thirty-six-year-old Andor Weér, a published writer, lives with his mother, Miss Rebeka Weér, a former stage actress who hasn't left their Budapest apartment in fifteen years. The apartment is furnished with props the actress has stolen from her various productions—"the armchair had once belonged to Lady Macbeth, the bed to Laura Lenbach, and the chest of drawers to Anna Karenina." Andor double-locks the door, reinforcing it with a crowbar from the outside whenever he leaves. He cooks the soup Mother survives on while he's away (sometimes he's invited to the country for reading appearances), stocks up on her vitamins, Valerian drops, lipsticks, nail polish, hair dyes, and mint tea. We live, he tells an old acquaintance, "like caged animals."

Deceptions, cross-deceptions, and treacherous switchbacks in chronology keep the reader distrustful. An opaque landscape often veils Andor's world when bouts of nausea, shivering, and shaking create anguish in him as the past hammers down.

Bartis never fails to stun us. "I already knew the floor plan of the Dachau concentration camp as well as I knew the palm of my own hand, could tell you the name of every kapo and find the soup cauldron with my eyes closed, even in my dreams." We look up and gasp. We hear Bartis saying this story is too big for these pages, and if you think I'll help make sense of this, dear reader, you are mistaken.

No event marks the end of occupation—no parades and no hunting down of women who collaborated horizontally, as with the liberation of Paris, when Frenchwomen were captured, shaved, and exhibited in the streets. There is no sense of freedom, no personal sigh of relief. Was Andor really at Dachau? Was Mother? Is that how she knows that incinerated corpses sat up in the oven?

What stories does a writer write whose workroom is within an apartment he describes as an "eighty-two-square-meter crypt with a northern exposure"? Here's one: "It was a very simple story about a village priest named Albert Mohos who, after many years of faithful service, annihilated his entire congregation during a Good Friday Mass, with the rat poison he had mixed into the wafers."

And here is a bone-chilling dream of Andor's: "I … observed the day dawning over the woods, and waited for work to begin. Then the bloodhounds began to stir in their den. Growling, they pawed the ground, worried the bare bones, chewed on the spines whose marrow had long dried out, looking for leftover bits as they did every dawn. I put on my heavy coat, picked up the hooked cane and walked behind the hut to the corpse pit for their daily portion. That was my job: to feed the hounds twice a day and to not ask who the corpses had been."

Bartis renders even minor characters, like this countrywoman, with startling particularity. "In a neon-yellow vinyl bag placed between her feet, baby chicks were squawking while she was trying to calm her baby in her lap. Finally, the baby got what it wanted: the mother freed one of her breasts from her blouse and the infant's lips stuck to it like a leech."

Andor and Mother stay in our minds as if we once knew them. What greater sign of success can any novelist attain? Tranquility joins other acclaimed works of modern Hungarian literature, such as those by Imre Kertész, Péter Esterházy, Péter Nádas and Zsuzsa Bánk. "When I am thinking about a novel," Kertész once said, "I always think of Auschwitz." The essays of John Lukacs, particularly one that appeared in the...