On paper, Lázár sounds like a baroque historical epic: it tracks three generations of an aristocratic Hungarian family across the first half of the 20th century against a modernising and calcifying Europe. Real historical figures drift through the background, and the horror of World War II looms over every chapter.
But Biedermann continually tilts the camera away from the war room and towards the bedroom, the kitchen, the alleyways of Hungary where the intimate lives of those three generations unfold. Page after page, Lázár insists that private desires never yield to public catastrophe.
It’s easy to dismiss this impulse, which almost all characters display at different points of the novel, as shallow self-absorption. As a reader, it does feel jarring, almost morally unsettling, to focus on the minuscule details of each person’s obsessions while entire countries collapse about their heads.
But Biedermann, at 22 years of age (a fact the critics love), has managed to capture a simple truth about humans: individual human beings rarely experience history through battle maps or political treaties. We experience it through the narrow aperture of our own hearths and our own heartbreaks.
Even as the macro-landscape grows chaotic, we retreat fiercely into our intimate dramas. We worry about whether someone loves us back, if the colour of this dress goes with the colour of those shoes, or why an argument from five years ago still keeps us awake at night.
In an interview with The Cold Magazine, Biedermann explained the rationale behind this choice:
I really wanted to focus on my characters’ private lives and show how, at times, the characters care more about their private life than they do about these big historical events.
They are invested in what they can control – their own life and the people they love, how they express love, and also how they betray each other. At the end of the day, I’m not a historian and I’m 22 years old. I don’t have the capacity to say very smart things about these historical events, but I can show how they affected daily life and people. I didn’t live during these times, but I know how families work.
Lázár’s ambition is undeniable; the author takes a massive swing at a generational epic. But I do think that same ambition becomes its Achilles heel. When you condense long sweeps of history, you run the risk of having significant historical events show up one after the other like luggage on a conveyor belt.
Beyond its historical ambitions, Lázár also promises a Gothic undertone, but its execution doesn’t quite land. We get tiredly familiar ropes like getting lost in dark woods, talking shadows, and an uncle who seems to retain his place in the narrative purely to justify the Gothic label. I’d go so far as to say the novel could have done away with this thread entirely, leaving the history, environment and family dramas to maintain the atmosphere.
Biedermann’s self-proclaimed literary influences run through the book both attributed and unattributed: here a character reads Virginia Woolf for the first time and is irrevocably changed by it, there a Benedictine chaplain hiding from the Gestapo invokes Marcel Proust at every turn.
Proust, specifically, is a looming presence in this novel. Somewhere towards the middle of the novel, there’s a paragraph that paraphrases the original opening of Swann’s Way: “For a long time I used to go to bed early…”
But where Proust’s version is long-winding and intensely sensory, Biedermann’s pastiche is shorter and deftly evokes oppressive gloom and despair. To quote Kenneth M Walsh’s review: “Biedermann admires Proust’s high-society aestheticism but wants to smash it into the darkest decades of modern Europe.”
(An aside: I think the fact that the paragraph leapt out to me the way it did ultimately attests to the singularity of Proust’s style. His motifs and evocativeness are so distinct that the passage immediately asserted its lineage, even without attribution.)
In all, I think Lázár was a hell of an undertaking, if a swing and a miss on some aspects. Biedermann wields his prose deftly, and for that reason alone I’m keen to see what he takes on next.