The Lázár family

There is a castle in the woods that thrives on memories. It devours them. These are the memories that the Lázár family are trying to save from the onslaught of History with a capital H. But time cannot be stopped: even on the edge of the world, it continues to flow. The years are beginning to slip away. And life is crumbling.

As the 20th century sweeps through Hungary, caught between two world wars and the rise of the communist regime, three generations are consumed by love, betrayal, obsessions and secrets. A family trapped in a fate that is not their own. And the more they struggle against their own downfall, the deeper they sink into it. Madness then seems to be the only sensible thing: a refuge from the brutality of reality and the inexorability of time.

Nelio Biedermann, born in 2003 and raised in Thalwil on Lake Zurich, has written his second novel, drawing inspiration from the history of his ancestors – Hungarian nobles – and that of his grandparents, who sought refuge in Switzerland in the 1950s. The book has spent twenty-nine weeks on the German bestseller lists, is scheduled for publication in over thirty countries, and has already had its film rights sold.

*I Lázár* is part of the Central European literary tradition, with references to Thomas Mann, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Marcel Proust and Virginia Woolf. In such an ambitious project, it is hard not to be reminded of "Il Gattopardo" or "I Buddenbrook". But racing through half a century of history in three hundred pages carries its own risks: episodes pile up without time to settle and develop into a genuine narrative arc, the characters remain psychologically thin, and the story leaves a few narrative gaps. The prose occasionally stumbles over marked shifts in register and somewhat unchecked syntax, resulting in ponderous sentences and weak logical connections. When he eschews the more mannered effects, Biedermann is able to create effective clashes between everyday life and the traumatic intrusion of external events. What is lost is the dark fairy-tale atmosphere of the opening pages, suspended between the Gothic and magical realism: evocative elements full of promise remain unexplored, whilst in the final section dates and events pile up and the book increasingly takes on the contours of a historical novel. The result is a work that does not always succeed in lending depth to the breadth of its conception.

And as one era draws to a close, the ambiguities of a family come to the fore; a family which, despite its nostalgia for a compromised order, continues to pursue happiness: the chance to escape the fate inherited from history and write its own.

Nelio Biedermann
and Lázár
Guanda, 304 pp., 19 euros