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.