Few first novels, let alone literary debuts in translation from German, arrive with quite so many plaudits – or better covers for those who like horses – as the 23-year-old Nelio Biedermann’s Lázár, which sold more than 200,000 copies on its release in Germany and Switzerland last year. ‘A truly great writer steps onto the stage,’ trumpets Daniel Kehlmann, who is no stranger to great writing: his latest novel, The Director, is on the International Booker Prize longlist. To Patti Smith, Biedermann is ‘gifted’.
He is also a scion of the eponymous Lázárs, an aristocratic Hungarian family, making this first foray into fiction a personal project. The narrative spans the first half of the 20th century, taking in three generations; the collapse of the Habsburg empire; two world wars; and the Hungarian national uprising in 1956. Comparisons with Joseph Roth’s The Radetzky March and Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks are inevitable, given that those books deal with familial and monarchical decline. I was also reminded of Nino Haratischwili’s Georgian family epic, The Eighth Life.
We’re never really allowed to forget that this epic novel was written by someone barely out of school
But Lázár is no conventional history. From the outset, the story is imbued with magical realist tropes, such as the birth of a ‘translucent child’, whose tiny organs are visible beneath his skin. The baby is Lajos von Lázár, the year is 1900 and the forest is swallowing ‘the last of the murky blue light’ on the evening of Epiphany. This is the same forest that has also swallowed Lajos’s grandfather, snatched his grandmother, driven his uncle mad and will later devour his sister, Ilona, in a fantastical metaphor that presages the giant loss of life to come with global conflict.
Biedermann, who grew up on Lake Zurich, writes with a Gen Z sensibility. Young Ilona knew the family owed their wealth to the people staring down at them from the portraits on the dining room walls. Later, she feels it is wrong to have children in the hope that things would somehow be all right. He also writes a lot about penises. And he never really lets the reader forget that this epic novel (ably translated by Jamie Bulloch) was written by someone barely out of school, who is trying to justify the blood on his forebears’ hands. The passages about the pogroms in Budapest are haunting. ‘But the worst thing is, everybody knew and nobody did anything,’ a neighbour tells Lajos. Obvious, yes, but no less chilling for it.
Bierdermann is certainly gifted, but the novel isn’t perfect. The prose can be convoluted, with topsy-turvy sentences that leave you hunting for the subject. Reading it is worth the effort; but if the author is to be hailed as ‘a truly great writer’ he will need to prove he isn’t a one-trick show horse.
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