Miklós Szentkuthy: Chapter on love
“Women that are things against my fate” – this quotation from Th.Randolph (1638) is the slogan of Szentkuthy’s most popular book, published first time more than half century ago, that re-published again from time to time in Hungary.
The author: Miklos Szentkuthy is one of the most (if not the most) remarkable figure of 20th century Hungarian prose, whose international reocognition began with the several volumes published in France and highly acclaimed by critics. He, often characterized as a “Hungarian Joyce”, goes far beyond the concept of 19th century novel and with his outstanding imagination, incredible linguistic capacity and wonderful intellect means a turning point in modern literature, that influences much more than just readers, writers and intellectuals in Central Europe.
Chapter on Love is a masterpiece of the writer in his early twenties. The novel, staged in the baroque Italy in its historical and political turbulence, describes and reflects on the possibilities and impossibilities of love, loving, love-making, as well as on the reverse: abandonement, betrayal, unfaithfullness, etc. The richness of the language is interwowen in the thrilling story, combined historical crisis with personal and emotional one, as the protagonist is tha mayor of a city, simultanously faced with the tragedy of his own life and with the tragedy of the city he is in charge with.
The series of wonderfully structured events are again and again slightly and consequently “broken” by series of reflections (that might be well called “essays”) that follow and challenge the pure story line. By these “interruptions” the tension in the prose is growing, while by the new and new aspects, introduced in these essays radically change the story line itself. The agony of the beloved one in the novel is situated in the agony of the city: facing invasion soon; while new hopes and expectations create an over-all optimistic tone in the novel. Human and “transcendental” contradictions are somehow mirrored in each other, as philosophical judgements and arguments create a strange atmosphere for the pure sensuality, sensitivity and general eroticism of the text.
The reader may feel at the same time a “mocking” genius who is just playing with his talent, being aware of the fact that there are no borders left uncrossed in his imagination and in his writing; and also there is the imprint of a hyper-sensitive intellect whose advantage and disadvantage is the same: his capacity of feeling everything much more than “normal” and his task to express all what he feels directly and indirectly – in the story and in the reflections. Chapter on Love is surewly the best way to introduce Szentkuthy or foreing audience: the attraction of the subject is unseparable from the highly seductive texture, the sensual-intellectual “trap” of this Hungarian genius works more than well already for more than half century, and will surely work for readers all over the world, interested in the non-traditional prose in the 20th century and interested in love, history and literature.
András Nagy