Sunflower by Gyula Krudy
translated from the Hungarian by John Batki
"You'll need life's disappointments and storms to find the path to happiness. Yes, go on and step out, have a good time and laugh a lot, dazzle and dance on. Sooner or later you'll have your fill of the masquerade."
This advice is given to the twenty-year-old Eveline, one of the key characters in Sunflower, an exquisite little novel that was first published in 1918. To say that Gyula Krudy's prose is sublime would be an understatement. Each passage of this book ripples like threads of gold and silver--each sentence is like a poem. This book is a gift to all who read it. My only complaint is that it was over much too soon. To compare Krudy to any other author, even Sandor Marai, whom we have to thank for his re-discovery, is both unfair and impossible. Though he lived in a modern time and Sunflower is considered to be a masterpiece of modern literature, Krudy used his pen to sketch images of old Hungary, a dream-laden world of imaginary people and imaginary events that take place in surrealistic settings. He was an eccentric author, whose style defies classification. Like his other work, Sunflower has only the vaguest of plots. The characters engage in activities that seem to transpire in another dimension, a dimension far removed from any reality that we have ever known, whether in the world of literature or otherwise.
"Eveline was petite, with black hair. She loved the color red. To amuse herself at home she dressed as a Gypsy girl."
This is our first vivid description of the enchanting Eveline, who begins the novel reading a book by the light of a candelabra. She is mourning her fiancee, a young charmer by the name of Kalman, who appears much later in the book. Krudy's metaphors are one of our first indications of his lyrical brilliance. When he describes Eveline's house growing quiet, "like a discarded diary whose heroes and heroines have departed from this world," and the garden paths under plantains "exhaling deeply like sleeping virgins," the reader does not have to wonder why Krudy has been called a master of "art-nouveau prose."
To imagine that I would recommend Sunflower merely on the basis of its beauty would be naive. It is a richly textured yet diaphanous tapestry of people, places, and adventures woven by an author whose place in literary history is assured more because of his individuality than anything else. He an eccentric genius in the vein of Shakespeare and Dante--a genius who seems to sum up Nabokov's famous quote, "Genius is non-conformity," just as well if not better than any other author
of the twentieth century.
Eveline is one in a dream-like assemblage of characters that sprinkle the 229 pages of Sunflower with a mythical, almost fairy-like stardust. In most ways, she is the very antithesis of her best friend, Malvina Maszkeradi, a more colorful yet much less predictable young woman. If Eveline seems too rigid and staid, Malvina appears to be almost wickedly capricious. Yet it isn't the characters in this novel that bewitch the reader. Rather, it is Krudy's prose. Echoing the stream-of-consciousness style of other writers yet never once comprimising his own unique voice, Krudy paints visual images with such copious grandeur, that you feel as if you've eaten a luxurious feast after a mere ten pages. Krudy is no mere author--he is a magician. It is only appropriate that the book is filled with witchcraft and superstition--indeed, it seems to cast a spell on the reader from the very first page. With an artistry that must be read to be fully comprehended, Krudy weaves sub-plots in and out of the main story, making you wonder which characters are at the crux of the book and which are incidental. We are introduced to Akos Almos-Dreamer, a man whose very name makes him sound like a character out of a fairy tale. Krudy begins by engaging the reader's interest in the history of Almos-Dreamer's family:
"They were the crazy Almos-Dreamers...For centuries the Almos-Dreamers had stalked wealthy widows, moneyed elderly women and females with prized dowries, pretty much the way they hunted the rarer kinds of egret in the marshy reeds of the Tisza.
That was back in the family's heyday.
As a result, they acquired historical ruins; forts, forests and castles. Women's curses, the shrieks of imprisoned spouses,
the sad and vengeful shades of wives dispatched to the other shore haunted the Almos-Dreamers....Curses turned into an owl's hoot, echoing crypts and mysterious moonlit forests loom in the remote history of many a Hungarian family....Men in their old age married as lightheartedly as the young. They would abduct their women if necessary....Old family histories all resemble each other."
When one thinks of Krudy as a modern writer, passages like this seem out of place. Yet that is part of his singularity as an author. He makes use of some of the same themes--aristocratic-like families and antiquated figures and customs of the past--that such past luminaries of Hungarian fiction as Kalman Mikszath made use of. And yet he does so in his own inimitable style.
Krudy is a paradox, an anomaly in the history of literature. Although it could be thought that he set out to introduce a new type of fiction with novels like Sunflower, it becomes more and more clear as one examines the details of his life that, like Balzac, he wrote because he had to--not to create a reputation as a literary innovator.
While the first Eveline is pure and virtuous, the Eveline that enters the life of the member of the Almos-Dreamer clan that
the reader becomes acquainted with, Akos Almos-Dreamer, is an entirely different creature.
"One day they (the Almos-Dreamer family) abducted a blonde witch whose blue eyes flashed with all the colors of a mountain stream. She was as supple as a silvery birch in springtime. And like tumbleweed she clung to men. She spoke the language of
grasses, old trees and crossroads. She could make herself understood to beasts. The windmill's blades stopped when she blew at them."
She becomes Almos-Dreamer's fourth wife...and his obsession, or what Krudy describes as "...an aging man's desperate, sleepless passion." She tells Almos-Dreamer about all the affairs she engages in over the course of their marriage. Yet in spite of this, his desire for her only grows in intensity. In many respects, she is a well-deserved match for a man who hurt countless women in the past, a man who has made a "whole slew of women cry." In spite of all his efforts, Almos-Dreamer fails to satisfy Eveline. He cannot make her love him no matter what he does. Eventually, he decides to commit suicide, and Eveline, who believes that the true test of a man's love is whether or not he's willing to die for her, urges him to do it.
Krudy interjects this part of the story in such a skillful way that you never feel that it doesn't fit in with the rest of the whole. And it does tie in, even if it isn't instantly apparent.
There are many digressions of this nature in Sunflower, and this could lessen its general appeal. At times it does seem painfully beautiful, almost like a diamond that is too bright to rest your eyes upon for more than a moment or two. To expect Krudy to write like any other author would be like expecting Chopin to write music like that of another composer.
As the book surges onward, like a fountain that never stops flowing for a second, we are introduced to Kalman, the lover of Eveline's who threatens to kill himself when she rejects him. Interspersed with the story are discursive and astute insights. Krudy appears to view love as both malady and joy:
"Love can be a most ridiculous and childish thing, as long as it amuses or torments others.
It is the clown's pancake makeup daubed on our fellow men's faces.
Or a flamboyantly long pheasant feather stuck in a dunce's cap.
Or worthless filberts used by children and old men in games of chance
Everyone appears ridiculous when in love."
It's passages like this that prevent the opulence of this novel, the overpowering lyricism, the poetry that often seems to have no end and no beginning, from seeming overwhelming. There is nothing predictable or sensible about this book or the characters inside it. When we become acquainted with Maskeradi, we are once again well aware that we've crossed paths with
another remarkable figure.
"Had he the inclination, Maszkeradi could have seduced and abducted the entire female population of Chamois Street. He was a stray soul, French or German in origin, variously prince in exile or cardsharp, refined gentleman or midnight serenader, fencing master or freeloader, as the occasion demanded."
Maszkeradi quickly makes a grand exit, though he returns from the dead as a beguiling ghost. In this ghastly form, he impregnates the female conquest who killed him by sticking a knitting needle into his heart and a nail into the crown of his head. Malvina Maszkeradi is the result of this supernatural union, and it is no surprise that she turns out to be one of the most bizarre and mesmerizing characters in the book. Ironically, she is also full of common sense. Perhaps the fact her mother died in childbirth, leaving her an orphan who at a young age must be entirely independent, has made her wise beyond her years. She tells Eveline, in a monologue that is part confession, part advice:
"I must always look within myself for everything. I believe only in myself, and myself alone, and I don't give a damn about others' opinions. I view each of my acts as if I were reading about it fifty years from now, in a newly found diary. Did I do something ridiculous and dumb? I ask myself each night when I close my eyes. I think over each word, each act: will I regret it, come tomorrow? I am my own judge and I judge myself as harshly as if I'd been lying in my grave these hundred years, my life a yellowed parchment diary, its end known in advance....I want to know this very minute what I will think ten years from now about today, about today's weather and about this night....Will I have to be ashamed of some weakness or tenderness?....I try to modulate my decisions and my emotions by looking ahead and seeing whether I'd regret it tomorrow."
Such words of wisdom from a young woman make this book seem more like a fairy tale than ever. Who has discovered these things for themselves without making countless mistakes first? We can only feel grateful that Krudy pulls off all these insights with such incandecsent lyricism, never once lapsing into pedantry or making anything seem like a moral lesson.
In spite of the sheer bliss that reading a book this magnificent makes the reader feel, there is still a vein of melancholy that runs like a black thread through the center of all the silver and gold. Krudy's sees life as both bitter and sweet, and he makes use of minor characters when it comes to conveying his message:
"People's life stories sound to me like tales heard in the restaurant of a train station. The train stands snowed in and people tell each other experiences and observations. In hindsight everyone knows where he made his mistakes. I have yet to find a traveler at the train station who was content. One has to be very stupid to find life bearable."
Krudy's view of life almost seems nihilistic; yet, there is nothing bleak about this book. It is like a series of love letters that you want to keep reading and re-reading. It both confuses you and thrills you, both stuns you and enchants you, both saddens you and leaves you ecstatic. Reading it is like breathing the fragrance of wild roses. Amid bunches of classic books that are read and revered, this little masterpiece stands alone like an exotic jewel. Don't let it pass you by.
Gyula Krudy is regarded as the greatest prose writer of Hungary in the twentieth century. Why? John Lukacs, in his brilliant introduction to this NYRB Classics edition, may sum it up best:
"...one of the marks of Krudy's extraordinary position in the history of Hungarian literature (and, if I may say so, in the history of Hungarian mentality), is the character of his unclassifiability....That alone is a mark of his greatness. The unclassifiable character of his style, of his vision, of his very Hungarianness is more than the mark of an eccentric talent: the talent exists not because it is eccentric, and the eccentricity is remarkable not because it is talented. Like a Shakespeare or a Dante or a Goethe in their very different ways, Krudy is a genius."
Although all but forgotten in the years following his death, Krudy was re-discovered in the 1940s by Marai. During his lifetime he was awarded Hungary's top literary award, the Baumgarten Prize.
Sunflower was originally published in installments as Napraforgo in the Budapest daily Virnadot in 1918. It appeared in book form later that same year. It was not translated into English until 1997.
My rating: *****+++
~Titania
translated from the Hungarian by John Batki
"You'll need life's disappointments and storms to find the path to happiness. Yes, go on and step out, have a good time and laugh a lot, dazzle and dance on. Sooner or later you'll have your fill of the masquerade."
This advice is given to the twenty-year-old Eveline, one of the key characters in Sunflower, an exquisite little novel that was first published in 1918. To say that Gyula Krudy's prose is sublime would be an understatement. Each passage of this book ripples like threads of gold and silver--each sentence is like a poem. This book is a gift to all who read it. My only complaint is that it was over much too soon. To compare Krudy to any other author, even Sandor Marai, whom we have to thank for his re-discovery, is both unfair and impossible. Though he lived in a modern time and Sunflower is considered to be a masterpiece of modern literature, Krudy used his pen to sketch images of old Hungary, a dream-laden world of imaginary people and imaginary events that take place in surrealistic settings. He was an eccentric author, whose style defies classification. Like his other work, Sunflower has only the vaguest of plots. The characters engage in activities that seem to transpire in another dimension, a dimension far removed from any reality that we have ever known, whether in the world of literature or otherwise.
"Eveline was petite, with black hair. She loved the color red. To amuse herself at home she dressed as a Gypsy girl."
This is our first vivid description of the enchanting Eveline, who begins the novel reading a book by the light of a candelabra. She is mourning her fiancee, a young charmer by the name of Kalman, who appears much later in the book. Krudy's metaphors are one of our first indications of his lyrical brilliance. When he describes Eveline's house growing quiet, "like a discarded diary whose heroes and heroines have departed from this world," and the garden paths under plantains "exhaling deeply like sleeping virgins," the reader does not have to wonder why Krudy has been called a master of "art-nouveau prose."
To imagine that I would recommend Sunflower merely on the basis of its beauty would be naive. It is a richly textured yet diaphanous tapestry of people, places, and adventures woven by an author whose place in literary history is assured more because of his individuality than anything else. He an eccentric genius in the vein of Shakespeare and Dante--a genius who seems to sum up Nabokov's famous quote, "Genius is non-conformity," just as well if not better than any other author
of the twentieth century.
Eveline is one in a dream-like assemblage of characters that sprinkle the 229 pages of Sunflower with a mythical, almost fairy-like stardust. In most ways, she is the very antithesis of her best friend, Malvina Maszkeradi, a more colorful yet much less predictable young woman. If Eveline seems too rigid and staid, Malvina appears to be almost wickedly capricious. Yet it isn't the characters in this novel that bewitch the reader. Rather, it is Krudy's prose. Echoing the stream-of-consciousness style of other writers yet never once comprimising his own unique voice, Krudy paints visual images with such copious grandeur, that you feel as if you've eaten a luxurious feast after a mere ten pages. Krudy is no mere author--he is a magician. It is only appropriate that the book is filled with witchcraft and superstition--indeed, it seems to cast a spell on the reader from the very first page. With an artistry that must be read to be fully comprehended, Krudy weaves sub-plots in and out of the main story, making you wonder which characters are at the crux of the book and which are incidental. We are introduced to Akos Almos-Dreamer, a man whose very name makes him sound like a character out of a fairy tale. Krudy begins by engaging the reader's interest in the history of Almos-Dreamer's family:
"They were the crazy Almos-Dreamers...For centuries the Almos-Dreamers had stalked wealthy widows, moneyed elderly women and females with prized dowries, pretty much the way they hunted the rarer kinds of egret in the marshy reeds of the Tisza.
That was back in the family's heyday.
As a result, they acquired historical ruins; forts, forests and castles. Women's curses, the shrieks of imprisoned spouses,
the sad and vengeful shades of wives dispatched to the other shore haunted the Almos-Dreamers....Curses turned into an owl's hoot, echoing crypts and mysterious moonlit forests loom in the remote history of many a Hungarian family....Men in their old age married as lightheartedly as the young. They would abduct their women if necessary....Old family histories all resemble each other."
When one thinks of Krudy as a modern writer, passages like this seem out of place. Yet that is part of his singularity as an author. He makes use of some of the same themes--aristocratic-like families and antiquated figures and customs of the past--that such past luminaries of Hungarian fiction as Kalman Mikszath made use of. And yet he does so in his own inimitable style.
Krudy is a paradox, an anomaly in the history of literature. Although it could be thought that he set out to introduce a new type of fiction with novels like Sunflower, it becomes more and more clear as one examines the details of his life that, like Balzac, he wrote because he had to--not to create a reputation as a literary innovator.
While the first Eveline is pure and virtuous, the Eveline that enters the life of the member of the Almos-Dreamer clan that
the reader becomes acquainted with, Akos Almos-Dreamer, is an entirely different creature.
"One day they (the Almos-Dreamer family) abducted a blonde witch whose blue eyes flashed with all the colors of a mountain stream. She was as supple as a silvery birch in springtime. And like tumbleweed she clung to men. She spoke the language of
grasses, old trees and crossroads. She could make herself understood to beasts. The windmill's blades stopped when she blew at them."
She becomes Almos-Dreamer's fourth wife...and his obsession, or what Krudy describes as "...an aging man's desperate, sleepless passion." She tells Almos-Dreamer about all the affairs she engages in over the course of their marriage. Yet in spite of this, his desire for her only grows in intensity. In many respects, she is a well-deserved match for a man who hurt countless women in the past, a man who has made a "whole slew of women cry." In spite of all his efforts, Almos-Dreamer fails to satisfy Eveline. He cannot make her love him no matter what he does. Eventually, he decides to commit suicide, and Eveline, who believes that the true test of a man's love is whether or not he's willing to die for her, urges him to do it.
Krudy interjects this part of the story in such a skillful way that you never feel that it doesn't fit in with the rest of the whole. And it does tie in, even if it isn't instantly apparent.
There are many digressions of this nature in Sunflower, and this could lessen its general appeal. At times it does seem painfully beautiful, almost like a diamond that is too bright to rest your eyes upon for more than a moment or two. To expect Krudy to write like any other author would be like expecting Chopin to write music like that of another composer.
As the book surges onward, like a fountain that never stops flowing for a second, we are introduced to Kalman, the lover of Eveline's who threatens to kill himself when she rejects him. Interspersed with the story are discursive and astute insights. Krudy appears to view love as both malady and joy:
"Love can be a most ridiculous and childish thing, as long as it amuses or torments others.
It is the clown's pancake makeup daubed on our fellow men's faces.
Or a flamboyantly long pheasant feather stuck in a dunce's cap.
Or worthless filberts used by children and old men in games of chance
Everyone appears ridiculous when in love."
It's passages like this that prevent the opulence of this novel, the overpowering lyricism, the poetry that often seems to have no end and no beginning, from seeming overwhelming. There is nothing predictable or sensible about this book or the characters inside it. When we become acquainted with Maskeradi, we are once again well aware that we've crossed paths with
another remarkable figure.
"Had he the inclination, Maszkeradi could have seduced and abducted the entire female population of Chamois Street. He was a stray soul, French or German in origin, variously prince in exile or cardsharp, refined gentleman or midnight serenader, fencing master or freeloader, as the occasion demanded."
Maszkeradi quickly makes a grand exit, though he returns from the dead as a beguiling ghost. In this ghastly form, he impregnates the female conquest who killed him by sticking a knitting needle into his heart and a nail into the crown of his head. Malvina Maszkeradi is the result of this supernatural union, and it is no surprise that she turns out to be one of the most bizarre and mesmerizing characters in the book. Ironically, she is also full of common sense. Perhaps the fact her mother died in childbirth, leaving her an orphan who at a young age must be entirely independent, has made her wise beyond her years. She tells Eveline, in a monologue that is part confession, part advice:
"I must always look within myself for everything. I believe only in myself, and myself alone, and I don't give a damn about others' opinions. I view each of my acts as if I were reading about it fifty years from now, in a newly found diary. Did I do something ridiculous and dumb? I ask myself each night when I close my eyes. I think over each word, each act: will I regret it, come tomorrow? I am my own judge and I judge myself as harshly as if I'd been lying in my grave these hundred years, my life a yellowed parchment diary, its end known in advance....I want to know this very minute what I will think ten years from now about today, about today's weather and about this night....Will I have to be ashamed of some weakness or tenderness?....I try to modulate my decisions and my emotions by looking ahead and seeing whether I'd regret it tomorrow."
Such words of wisdom from a young woman make this book seem more like a fairy tale than ever. Who has discovered these things for themselves without making countless mistakes first? We can only feel grateful that Krudy pulls off all these insights with such incandecsent lyricism, never once lapsing into pedantry or making anything seem like a moral lesson.
In spite of the sheer bliss that reading a book this magnificent makes the reader feel, there is still a vein of melancholy that runs like a black thread through the center of all the silver and gold. Krudy's sees life as both bitter and sweet, and he makes use of minor characters when it comes to conveying his message:
"People's life stories sound to me like tales heard in the restaurant of a train station. The train stands snowed in and people tell each other experiences and observations. In hindsight everyone knows where he made his mistakes. I have yet to find a traveler at the train station who was content. One has to be very stupid to find life bearable."
Krudy's view of life almost seems nihilistic; yet, there is nothing bleak about this book. It is like a series of love letters that you want to keep reading and re-reading. It both confuses you and thrills you, both stuns you and enchants you, both saddens you and leaves you ecstatic. Reading it is like breathing the fragrance of wild roses. Amid bunches of classic books that are read and revered, this little masterpiece stands alone like an exotic jewel. Don't let it pass you by.
Gyula Krudy is regarded as the greatest prose writer of Hungary in the twentieth century. Why? John Lukacs, in his brilliant introduction to this NYRB Classics edition, may sum it up best:
"...one of the marks of Krudy's extraordinary position in the history of Hungarian literature (and, if I may say so, in the history of Hungarian mentality), is the character of his unclassifiability....That alone is a mark of his greatness. The unclassifiable character of his style, of his vision, of his very Hungarianness is more than the mark of an eccentric talent: the talent exists not because it is eccentric, and the eccentricity is remarkable not because it is talented. Like a Shakespeare or a Dante or a Goethe in their very different ways, Krudy is a genius."
Although all but forgotten in the years following his death, Krudy was re-discovered in the 1940s by Marai. During his lifetime he was awarded Hungary's top literary award, the Baumgarten Prize.
Sunflower was originally published in installments as Napraforgo in the Budapest daily Virnadot in 1918. It appeared in book form later that same year. It was not translated into English until 1997.
My rating: *****+++
~Titania
Last edited:
. It gives a whole new meaning to the word decadence.
