László Lator writes about Zsuzsa Rakovszky, “From the outset, it is the same, intent voice we hear. Her linguistic, syntactic or rhythmic forms masked as rough or fragmented, her stylistic amalgams moulded from disparate elements, her attention open to the great drama of existence in petty circumstances, have not changed in the least.” In the new cycle among these selections, sixteen characters tell their respective dramatic monologues; with the exception of the fallen dictator, they are characteristic players of a great city, and reveal familiar roles of life. Sometimes they evoke sympathy, sometimes they are pathetic, but their fragments of memory, their feelings and their experiences are always universal, and strike the reader with the power of clear and sharp observation.

 

 

The “one-way street” is the metaphor of time: Rakovszky’s new book attempts to capture time and death both physically and metaphysically; it examines the conscious mind. The sequence “About Time” is a confession about the relationship of the present and the past, about the dialectics of “it does not pass” and “it does not ever come back”, told in a tone both personal and at the same time universally true, as it does not spare the reader from facing “unwrinkled non-existence”. One might think of the philosophical and sensual layers of T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, although Rakovszky’s intent and personal voice and the unity of her poetry in terms of language-metaphor-experience are unmistakable.

In this fictive autobiography, a 17th century Hungarian-German burgess from Sopron, Ursula Léhmann, recollects her twists of fate with passion and the graphic sensuality characteristic of Zsuzsa Rakovszky. Ursula describes how she lost her mother in the plague, how she became an unwed mother, then lost the baby, and how, after the death of her stepmother, her father forced her first to marry him, then to connive in his crime. Hungary of the Turkish conquest era provides the backdrop for the story, when Habsburg emperors, Ottoman sultans and Transylvanian princes pitted their forces against one another, while religious strife between Catholics and Protestants plagued Europe. But in the eye of this civilian chronicler, the great events are shadowed by the memory of violence, fanaticism, the fire of 1676 and the plague. The central motif of the title, the snake, is the apothecary�s sign (it refers to the trade of Ursula�s father), as much as it is a symbol of seduction and intrigue. Besides, a folk belief has it that snakes scare at the sight of their own shadows.

 

�[Rakovsky�s] descriptions of the countryside are vivid and poetic, her psychological probing acute (in a thoroughly modern manner), the construction of her periods, and the rhythm these impart to the text, nicely poised, with a near-musical flow....The Shadow of the Snake is a true epic, and what is more, completely stylised and self-reflexive�a post-modern epic.�

                                                                       -Miklós Györffy, The Hungarian Quarterly

 

MAGVETŐ, BUDAPEST, 2005. 400 PAGES

Zsuzsa Rakovszky has set her second novel in the 1950s, in the small-town of her birthplace close to the Hungarian border to Austria. The main protagonist is a little girl by the name of Piroska who, with her father dead, is being raised by her mother, who in turn has attachments to two other men, and in the end is obliged to choose between them. Devoted to her daughter, the mother does not dare to pick Bartha, the more original of the two, so she is left with the simpler but decent Pista.
            The character of the mother is left veiled in mystery throughout, if only because, like everything else, she is viewed from the child�s point of view, although the narrative voice is in the third person. Thus, the story line is controlled by the child�s realm of sensation and imagination, in the same way as the mother�s fate is determined by her horizon. There are equally marvellous passages about a child�s experience of death and fear of death as there are about the everyday sights of Hungary during the Stalinist regime under the dictator Rákosi. The treatment the girl faces in her nursery school typifies the whole era, with its inhuman ambience reflecting the wider society.
            The �Year of the Falling Star� is 1956. It is not just a matter of the literal falling of red stars from buildings during the Hungarian Revolution (nothing is said about that here, though the reader might bring awareness of this to the work), but the year in which an era in the lives of all the novel�s main characters draws to a close: the little girl spends her last few months at nursery school; her mother marries boring Pista, who has returned home from internment as a prisoner of war in a Soviet labour camp; Bartha, a raffish figure from Budapest�s theatre life, flees the country to take up a new life in Vienna; while Nenne (Nanny), an old woman who lives with Piroska and her mother, dies. The stars that fall thus also signify the end of the mother�s hopes. The visionary passages of the penultimate chapter (�The Escape�) raise a suggestion that the womenfolk might be able to flee this world in a dinghy, but that remains a dream. As a final component of the book�s title, Piroska often sees shooting stars and is terrified that these really are falling to Earth.
            Built up like a mosaic of seemingly disconnected shards, most of the book�s story is assembled from the young girl�s recollections. However, this is periodically interrupted by the texts of various letters and diaries which appear to have no organic connection to the main plot, though by the end they are seen to fit in. The storytelling is frequently enhanced by lyrical interpolations of highly poetic language, notably in the evocation of natural phenomena. It is a metaphorical idiom well suited to conveying the mysteriousness and fearfulness of childhood.

�This is a book which conveys how it felt to be a child growing up during the Fifties.�
                                                                       -Magda Ferch, Magyar Nemzet

�The Year of the Falling Star is the sort of work that one simply cannot (should not) read through just the once.�
                                                                       -Gergely Angyalosi, Élet és Irodalom