Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Tranquility by Attila Bartis Attila Bartis. Tranquility begins with Andor's mother's funeral, but then jumps backwards and forwards through his earlier life. He remains wrapped up in his own concerns as progressive revelations reveal more and more shocking aspects of his family's history. Almost the entire novel revolves around Andor's relationships with women. His sister Judit is a violinist whose skill has allowed her to defect, to escape their mother as much as communism. Ezster, who he meets when she is about to throw herself off a bridge, has some dark secrets of her own but offers him the hope of a different life. And, when he begins to publish, his editor Eva turns out to have her own links to his family's past. Throw in a prostitute who collects crippled birds and a bar waitress, and there's scope for a messy — and explicitly described — sex life. The only male character Andor meaningfully interacts with is a rural priest. The setting is lightly sketched: the seedy underside of Budapest, the railway system, the communist bureaucracy, and so forth. The women in Andor's life have had their lives changed by politics, but politics remains peripheral, perhaps because of his own apathy. The horrors in Tranquility verge on farce, but its troubled characters are realistically and convincingly depicted. It is not the cheeriest of works, but it is told with a jaunty nonchalance that prevents it being nearly as gloomy as this bare description would suggest. Attila Bartis: Tranquility. This book just won the Three Percent Best Translation of 2008 prize, and while I can’t speak to the translation (though I have it on good authority that it’s excellent–thanks GJ), I was happy to have it win, being a booster of Hungarian lit in general (and Laszlo Krasznahorkai in particular). Jeff Waxman describes a not-uncommon worldview of Hungarian literature when he says, “ Tranquility is a book of unfathomable realism—by which, of course, I mean endless cruelty, depthless pain and emotional deadness.” Hungarian director Bela Tarr said it even better: And back then I thought “Okay, we have some social problems in this political system – maybe we’ll just deal with the social question.” And afterwards when we made a second movie and a third we knew better that there are not only social problems. We have some ontological problems and now I think a whole pile of shit is coming from the cosmos. And there’s the reason. You know how we open out step by step, film by film. It’s very difficult to speak about the metaphysical and that. No. It’s just always listening to life. And we are thinking about what is happening around us…I just think about the quality of human life and when I say ‘shit’ I think I’m very close to it. And it’s fair to say Bartis subscribes to something on the order of this view. What he brings to Tranquility that is very much his own is hysteria, at a level that is rarely encountered at such sustained length. Bernhard is a good contrast: while Bernhard’s narrators are obsessive, ranting, and irate, they are very rarely hysterical. Bartis’s breathless portrayal of unrelenting stress and compression owes the most, I’d say, to Celine and his spiritual disciple E.M Cioran, with a bit of Portnoy’s Complaint (namely, the end) mixed in. And with a book that is pitched so consistently at the level of hysteria, Bartis has to keep the changes coming so that the tone does not become monotonous. The story of Andor, a middle-aged man, and his exceedingly unhealthy realationship with his mother and only slightly healthier relationships with several women careens around just as Andor careens between the three women in his life (and the one absent one, his sister), never settling in one place long enough to set up a sustained narrative. This is evidently intentional, as the plot necessarily cannot get started with such a tone at work. Any concession to traditional narrative dynamics would wreck the effect, and this book is all about effect. Such a sustained howl can become numbing or exhausting; at times Bartis piles on so much pain that the book risks becoming a shaggy-dog story. It’s ultimately Andor’s relationship with his mother, and the sheer acuity and inexorability of it, that holds it all together. The other women are sweet relief in comparison. For Bartis, it seems that that level of hysteria, that sheer limit at which there is no appeal to reason and no possible escape, is fundamentally fostered in the mother-son bond. Tranquility by Attila Bartis. - Return to top of the page - See our review for fuller assessment. Review Summaries Source Rating Date Reviewer Le Figaro . 15/10/2007 Clémence Boulouque FAZ . 5/11/2005 Richard Kämmerlings The LA Times . 26/10/2008 Tom McGonigle Neue Zürcher Zeitung . 18/10/2005 Andreas Breitenstein Rev. of Contemp. Fiction . Spring/2009 Michael Pinker Die Zeit . 26/1/2006 Adam Olschewski. "L'Histoire s'affole, le communisme tombe, mais les rôles sont inchangés (. ) Dans ces faux-semblants et miroirs fragiles, ces identités écroulées, Attila Bartis tisse un roman en forme de toile d'araignée, où il file une réflexion sur le mensonge." - Clémence Boulouque, Le Figaro. - Return to top of the page - Tranquility is narrated by a writer, Andor Weér, and is a novel about the three very damaged women in his life and their intertwined relationships. The novel begins with the funeral of his mother, whom he can finally lay to rest. For fifteen years they lived together in the same apartment that she refused to leave, for fifteen years he had to endure here questioning ("Wherehaveyoubeenson?") and general misanthropy. Andor's sister, Judit, was a very talented and dedicated violinist, a budding star who defected to the West as soon as she could -- to escape Mom more than Communism, defection offering a buffer that she hoped would keep her at a safe distance, so that she would not longer have to try to erase herself, as Bartis nicely has her try to do. Overbearing Mom was a star in her own right, a famous actress, but her career came to an abrupt halt as soon as her daughter betrayed the motherland. The authorities tried to get her to entice Judit back, and when she couldn't she went so far as to declare that her daughter was dead to her and even went through a semi-mock funeral, complete with coffin (an impressive but awful and creepy scene). Judit stayed abroad, the authorities were unimpressed, and Rebeka Weér's acting career was over; henceforward she stayed in her apartment, and woe any uninvited guest who wanted to drop by for a visit . Andor can only stand up to Mom so much, but he does escape for short bursts. He tries to maintain the fiction of Judit staying in touch with her family by penning letters in her name and then having people who travel abroad send them, but Judit herself is never heard from again; as it turns out, the promising star was too damaged by Mom to truly make good a complete escape and turned to erasing herself again. Andor eventually finds a lover, Eszter, but she also comes with a lot of baggage, and it's a complicated relationship that develops. Mrs. Weér is no help, her reaction when Andor shows up at their doorstep with Eszter enough to scare anyone off. And it's not a matter of Andor standing up to his mother: this lady is such a single-minded, narcissistic, paranoid loon that there's nothing to be done -- until she finally conveniently dies. Rebeka Weér's strong, if highly unpleasant, personality certainly give Tranquility much of its momentum (careening through domestic catastrophes), but undriven Andor slows things down again. He and his fumblings -- and detours like a reading tour or his small attempts at escape from Mom, at least for a few days or hours -- are probably a necessary antidote to his mother's insanity, but leave the book oddly bogged down. Andor's relationships with Judit and Eszter -- especially that vacuum that Judit leaves behind, and which turns out to be even greater than he had imagined -- are well done, but there are an awful lot of deeply damaged souls the Bartis is juggling here. Yes, there's a comic side to it all too, especially Mom's paranoid insanities, but it's no pretty picture. The political leads to the personal: each of the women is, in a way, determined by political circumstances -- Juidt by that East-West divide that it would cost too much for her to cross back into, Rebeka by the authorities' control over who can and can't appear on the stage, and Eszter's more complicated childhood background. But aside from their causal effect, politics doesn't play much of a role in the story, even as Hungary is rapidly changing around them. Rebeka remains in her tiny bubble, unable and unwilling in any way to participate in the real world. And Andor is torn between all of this, buffeted around by the women in (and out of) his life. An interesting and very vivid psychological study, with some impressive scenes, but also some very difficult-to-take characters. Tranquility, Attila Bartis. This topic is currently marked as "dormant"—the last message is more than 90 days old. You can revive it by posting a reply. 1mirrani. Everything happened from whenareyoucomingback to wherehaveyoubeen: brokers of the soul established religions, chartered accountants rewrote the Revelation of Saint John, tornadoes were named after female singers, earthquakes after politicians, fifteen Nobel Peace Prizes found their laureates and as many old women managed to escape in a small boat from the last leper colony in the world. Between a single whenareyoucomingback and wherehaveyoubeen three new welfare laws and three hundred satellites began to function, in Asia, three languages were declared defunct and in Chile three thousand political prisoners were eliminated with the help of a collapsing mine. p11 An example of what was to come. I wasn't certain at first about the jumbled nature of the book, but toward the end I realized everything was fitting into place. The woman put scrambled eggs with onions and a mug of tea in front of me, sat in the far end of the table and silently watched me eat while she podded some peas or beans. For minutes, there was only the soft snoring of the night watchman, the patter of peas or beans in the washbowl, and the utensils clinking against my plate, as if these three sounds had filled the universe since the beginning of time. And the fork always clinked against the earthenware bowl when another pod had popped in the woman's hand. That's how the three of us played our music, filling the universe, until the switch bell began to ring, or until I finished my omelet or the washbowl filled with beans, but I don't really remember, and it makes no difference. p14 I'm starting to think that these things I make note of are all going to be longer clips, not because they're long winded, but because in order to experience the single thing, you have to have more of the whole. When the three railroad workers came into the compartment, I quickly took out the book I had received from the priest so that nestling into the corner I cold pretend to be reading because I didn't feel like talking to anybody and people usually do not bother a person who reads. They don't usually ask him where he is going, where he is coming from and whether he has a family and things like that. A person with a book in hand is not actually present. There is no need to offer him cookies or anything to drink, because the book makes him invisible. p70 I actually had to sit and contemplate how true this was. And it IS true. I guess I didn't know why it was I relied on having a book with me on the bus when I wanted to be left alone, I just read it, even if I couldn't read it. It's a subconscious thing, I guess, 'cause now I know why I did it. :) About being gay in Hungary. "You live only as long as you can lie into the mug of anybody, and without batting an eye. And when you can't anymore, well, it's time to get hold of that razor blade." p99 There was a gay man working in the theater with the narrator's mother. They kept telling the guy he should get married, and he avoided it for the longest time, but he finally couldn't take it any more. Being gay wasn't good for the country. Still, I dreaded the book, because I imagined it to be like the hollow of a Pompeian corpse with which everyone does whatever he or she wants. One could lie in it, naked, but one could also make a cast of it, using the cheapest plaster, and I would find that hard to accept. It's not that simple to let go of a sentence; and when I received the publisher's letter that not in the spring, because of budget-modification problems, but definitely in the fall, since the various literary readers' reports were excellent, and Eva Jordan, Editor wishes continued good work, I felt that my being buried alive had been postponed. p154 I think it's easy for writers to write about the feeling of waiting for approval of what is written. Such a visual feeling, though. Some of the repeating of wording that is meant to make things feel repetitive actually makes you feel like you've lost your place in the book. And there are times when I simply can't figure out why the son won't stand up for himself in front of his mother. He just lets her walk all over him. That annoys me to no end. For this matter, he doesn't stand up for the woman he claims to love either. I can't imagine not doing that. On page 205 there is an encounter with the editor, who is trying to have dinner with the writer and his girlfriend. He's upset at the way everyone's relationships are going and he gets furious. There is so much emotion here, I can't really include it all, it's pages long, but it starts with For minutes, neither of us moved. I wished the mirror would explode, tearing us to pieces, but nothing happened. We didn't even hear our pounding hearts. Nearing the end of the book, the jumbled nature of the story starts to make sense, you are more able to put things into a proper order in your mind. And the blank notebook may wind up in more deserving hands than mine, I thought. Maybe the conductor will write his memoirs in it, I thought, /Touched by the Engine's Smoke/, or something like that, I thought. I fear that God looks more favorably on even a train conductor's memoir, swarming with spelling mistakes, than on anything I will ever write. I also fear that something that's not worth a shit in heaven is likely to be worth the same down here, I thought. Even if the reviews are rather encouraging. p223 Again with writers being able to write about writing. Not even doing time in solitary confinement makes you as lonely as does a lie. p252 I know this feeling. and it's the final note on a book I enjoyed reading. Alive or dead, it really doesn’t matter. “Tranquility” is a moving, emotionally complex, subtle, shocking novel -- and the inadequacy of these words of praise might be overcome by considering imagery, such as the narrator’s “remembering how I crawled, like a creeper, upon the back of that woman. Like a slug on the wound of a decaying fruit tree.” Or this: “You live only as long as you can lie into the mug of anybody, and without batting an eye. And when you can’t anymore, well, it’s time to get hold of that razor blade.” Or this: "[The narrator’s mother’s] nakedness was like that of the dead, in whom only the corpse washer and God take any delight.” The first of Attila Bartis’ books to be made available in English, “Tranquility” may come as no revelation to those who have followed the incredible explosion of literary greatness coming out of modern Hungary: Peter Esterhazy, Peter Nadas, Imre Kertesz, Zsuzsa Bank. Each of these writers may seem like an individual voice speaking into a solitary silence, but the effect is of a startling chorus and of a sustaining vision of how to survive in a world that is increasingly hostile to the individual imagination. Andor Weer, the narrator of “Tranquility,” is a writer of short stories entangled with his aging, controlling mother who is terrified by the thought of being cremated (she has been told that her corpse will sit up in the oven). Once a leading actress on the Budapest stage, she has been reduced to playing bit parts as a punishment for being unable to lure her violinist daughter back to Hungary from the West. Spanning the declining years of the Communist regime, Bartis’ novel presents a form of narration that twines a record of Andor’s day-to-day life as a writer with what are surely snippets, both long and short, of stories echoing his own mastery of the short story (by which Bartis first rose to prominence in Hungary) in a novel that moves effortlessly through all levels of a truly damaged society attempting to recover from communist devastation. Bartis comes close to exemplifying Louis-Ferdinand Celine’s wonderfully provocative comment that one has to be a little bit dead to be really funny. Bartis fractures any sense we have as to whether the characters -- the narrator, his sister Judit, his girlfriends, his mother and father -- are actually alive or dead. And it doesn’t matter, for even the minor characters imprint themselves thoroughly upon one’s memory. Bartis creates an atmosphere of believability in this novel without forsaking the use of irony. Early in the story, for instance, Andor reads a short story to a provincial audience about a homicidal priest who kills off his congregation with poisoned communion wafers. After the reading, the priest in the village invites Andor to supper. “I’ve got a pretty good ceremonial wine, if you’ve got the courage,” he tells him. During the course of the evening, the priest reveals himself to be one of those rare members of the clergy -- a priest who actually does believe in God -- and, next morning, as Andor leaves on a train, the priest gives him a book as a gift. It isn’t a copy of Augustine’s “Confessions” or some such but is something else entirely, which isn’t revealed for another 30 pages. What that book is won’t be identified here -- no plot spoiler for readers -- so get the book as soon as you can.