Memories Wrested from Oblivion

...Here, for instance, is Melinda on her husband: "Not once has he let the bathtub overflow because he was thinking about something else...

...There is no moral emergency exit...

...As the self-lacerating quality of his introspection extends to his inner circle, we come to know David's family and friends with rare and sometimes painful intimacy...

...In '66 he leaves the country by swimming across the Adriatic...

...He was no resister...

...His self-absorption does not blunt his politeness...

...She was a kapo—she beat other inmates...

...The tanks are always followed by the milk carts and garbage trucks...

...It was your display of resistance, you know, that made that young man shoot me in the head...

...He taunts David for being a stick-in-the-mud with a cruelty allowed only one's best friend, or alter-ego (Konrad, too, elected not to leave Hungary...

...Indeed, incest is a perfect metaphor for the implosive intensity these characters exhibit as they berate and worship, dissect and resurrect one another...

...Today, there is one Jew left in town, a baker...

...Antal, the tight-lipped Calvinist, "inhuman and irritating in his strength," is yet more than he appears, "the kind of field in which excavation unearths an underground city...

...Reviewed by Betty Falkenberg Contributor, "Partisan Review," New York "Times Book Review" This swirling novel, the latest from the renowned Hungarian dissident and author George Konrad, is at once an elegant evocation of a Central European past and a fevered invocation to remember that past...

...Janos similarly derides David's heavy prose style: "He of the seven-league-boot sentences...

...It covered his hat and astrakhan-collared coat so thoroughly that his figure became indistinguishable from the white field...

...The feast-qua-re-union, as imagined by a writer, David Kobra, takes place in Budapest during the late 1980s, shortly before Communism collapsed there...

...The close encounter marked the end of childhood for David, who early in the novel tells us, "You cannot survive the deaths of others and remain innocent...

...The apparently fortuitous detail that is revealed by free association or random memory turns out to be as controlled and motivated as any Joycean or Proustian "digression...

...Though only a child of 11, he feels that his own bravura brought about the murder, and the dead victim would seem to agree: "My dear nephew, I haven't had the opportunity to thank you for what you did to me...

...By the time he reached Nagyvarad, he was running a fever...

...Readers may regard the guests as projections of Kobra's divided ego...

...Lucky Kobra...

...He is in Paris in May 1968, then goes to Vietnam, Chile, Portugal, Iran, Israel—wherever there is trouble...

...you forced him to resist...

...They are also students of the maverick scholar and translator, Jeremiah Kadron, whose daughter Melinda is Antal's wife and Janos' lover...

...David explains: "When one character speaks, the irony is in the voice...

...The three men all turn 23 in 1956, the year of the Hungarian Uprising...

...His longest sustained relationships are with Antal Tombor and Janos Dragoman...

...He is arrested after the 1956 Uprising and sentenced to two years on a state prison farm for taking photos and interviewing the rebels...

...Janos, on the other hand, is mercurial, a "dark-skinned pirate...

...Like a palimpsest, the more closely the novel is read the more layers are uncovered...

...Or as Melinda says of the trio, "We are bubbles in an aquarium...

...Of 200 Jewish schoolmates, "193 were gassed...

...But Konrad's radical method is to assemble infinitesimal fragments and enjoin the reader to help fit them together, like an intricate jigsaw puzzle...

...when several characters speak, the irony is in the structure...

...An aging Casanova on a macrobiotic diet, he winds up giving speeches on the paradoxes of Eastern Europe, "a star on the lecture circuit of American universities...

...That triangle fuels the most developed and engrossing story in this book crammed full of telescoped biographies that could each form the core of a separate novel...

...But it is this restless iconoclast, a modern version of the Wandering Jew, who throws up the shadows on the wall: images of what life might hold for one who chooses to escape rather than undertake some form of inner emigration...

...Shortly afterward, he lost consciousness...

...Wearing his bowler hat, Grandfather walked around and around the fence in the deep snow...

...The verdict is upheld by Klara, David's cousin and Arnold's daughter: "My father may have found a way to have himself shot by a third party, but you assisted in the act...

...He had pneumonia...

...The events recalled begin in 1944, the year Hungary's Jews were rounded up and shipped to concentration camps, and continue through the Communist era, when Jews again came under attack, this time as remnants of the bourgeoisie...

...The devotion to detail in these family portraits is both a private act of homage and a debt paid to historical conscience...

...it is a history not unlike that of the city and country itself, "where bombings and occupation are no more than brief interruptions...

...Kobra, in many ways a representation of Konrad, is 11 years old when the Jews of his small village of Ofalu are put on trains and sent to their deaths...

...Kobra wrests from oblivion the lives of "ordinary" people...

...I ask him for a glass of water, and he promptly brings me the alarm clock...

...He is being mummified into a classic...

...Nothing is discarded, nor does anything hold absolute authority...

...Konrad at times permits his protagonist to surrender the narrative to one of the guests, thus rounding out the players and enriching A Feast's content...

...Only through "a series of fortunate coincidences" do he and his immediate family escape the same fate...

...I've heard she owns a number of beauty and masseuse parlors....' In a glimpse that Melinda gives us of her parents, an entire marriage springs forth from a single image: "My father ...in his bathrobe chasing my mother in Dob Street with a fur coat under his arm, because she had run out of the house in her nightgown and he was afraid she would catch cold.' Some may object that the novel is too much a pastiche of vignettes...

...Needless to say, he is not happy anywhere...

...They shot him...

...that in fact, in such times as these, obedience is a moral error...

...Describing his last talk with his uncle, he recalls that Arnold said, " 'They shoot those who resist, and those who don't.' "'Mostly those who don't,' David put in...

...a ravaged trinity...

...How could it, in Kobra's world of the absurd...

...We, the characters of the novel," Melinda says, "tell one another what has happened to us...

...For the purposes of his narrative, however, they are conceived as members of an extended family, related by blood or marriage, and frequently both...

...If, as Janos maintains, "the best thing to put before the humanist as an object of meditation is a mass grave," then perhaps the second best thing is the word of one who bore witness...

...One issue that runs like a worried thread throughout the book revolves around a moral dilemma: Is resistance inherently right...

...A tale he tells of his grandfather trying to visit his young wife at an internment camp is a compelling example: "It was snowing hard in 1941 when Grandfather circled the barbed wire fence for hours, hoping to get a glimpse of his wife...

...you were spared...

...The young nephew learned this maxim so thoroughly then that he carries it with him to this day...

...In A Feast in the Garden, George Konrad has set forth his testimony in particularly searching terms...

...As each comes to light, it forms a new gestalt with the old...

...Nearly frozen, Grandfather got on the train at 10 in the evening...

...This was already the viewpoint of his generation...

...He summons his guests "from overseas and from the cemeteries," so that they may each tell their own stories...

...In addition to the centred characters, parents and grandparents figure large in this "cabbalistic hocus-pocus mystery play on Resurrection Square...

...Our distinguished dissident writer and human-rights activist...

...The hairdresser, Grandfather's second wife, survived the concentration camp...

...The argument is triggered by David's role in the death of his favorite uncle, Arnold...

...David never denies his involvement, but he defends his belief in the importance of resistance...

...It is a saga about long-term devotion amid and beyond betrayals, of metamorphoses within permanence...