A Wunderkind’s Best-Selling Nostalgia
“Make it new,” proclaimed the poet Ezra Pound early in the twentieth century. It was his advice to fellow-modernists, and it became the de-facto slogan of a movement that sought to unsettle convention and reinvigorate language. The motto of our contemporary cultural apparatus might as well be “make it old.” Even before A.I. threatened us quite so acutely with the prospect of eternal recombination, a spate of period dramas, remakes, sequels, and adaptations had already paved the way for a future consisting of regurgitated scraps of the past.
Take the past few years alone: 2024 brought “Nosferatu,” a remake of Werner Herzog’s 1979 remake of the 1922 original, which was in turn an adaptation of Bram Stoker’s novel “Dracula,” published in 1897. Last year came tired entries in the “Superman,” “Freaky Friday,” and “Jurassic Park” franchises, and this year promises to imitate the last, as next year will no doubt imitate this one. If Emerald Fennell’s vapid “Wuthering Heights” was not sufficient punishment for our complacent unoriginality, reboots of the shows “Malcolm in the Middle” and “Scooby-Doo” are in the works. The series “Bridgerton” was Jane Austen pastiche; HBO’s “The Gilded Age” was Edith Wharton pastiche; and “Lázár,” a best-selling novel that is making waves in German-speaking Europe, is Joseph Roth pastiche.
“Lázár” ’s author, Nelio Biedermann, is a twenty-two-year-old student at the University of Zurich. Biedermann grew up in Switzerland, but his much-lauded book is an attempt to reimagine the life of his ancestors, Hungarian aristocrats who weathered both world wars and lost their fortune under Communism. The novel is a generational epic in the old mold, a kind of remake of Roth’s “Radetzky March” (1932). It begins in 1900 and follows the Lázár dynasty through the First and Second World Wars, all the way into the drab stylings of Hungary’s Communist fifties.
When the book begins, Baron Sándor von Lázár and his wife, Mária, are creatures of the nineteenth century, so helplessly ensconced in the fortress of the past that Sándor reads yesterday’s newspapers, which take an additional twenty-four hours to travel from Budapest to his estate in southwestern Hungary. What Biedermann rather grandiosely describes as “the snow of the dying century” is still glistening on the grounds when Mária gives birth to a son, Lajos, who has translucent skin and otherworldly blue eyes. (It soon emerges that he is the product of Mária’s short-lived liaison with a groom who works in the stables.) Lajos’s sister, Ilona, is disturbed by the spectral baby and disgusted by the bloody meat that her parents expect her to eat each night for dinner. She surreptitiously funnels morsels to the dogs beneath the table—until she gets her first period, disappears mysteriously into the woods, and returns a ravenous carnivore.
“Lázár” moves quickly, scarcely leaving readers time to settle into one moment before whisking them off to the next. How else could it race through the most eventful half century of European history in fewer than three hundred pages? Before long, the First World War is over, and Ilona and Lajos are adults. Ilona marries the heir to a Jewish banking fortune (we can already see what is coming); Lajos’s wife, Lilly, is the daughter of a wealthy businessman. Soon after their honeymoon, we see Lajos and Lilly with children of their own: Pista, a troubled boy who talks to the shadows in the yard, and Eva, a baby too young to bother endowing with a personality.
Biedermann has a magical-realist streak, and “Lázár” is forever sprouting lightly supernatural subplots. Peasants whisper about monsters in the forest, and in the interlude between the wars, Lajos gazes at a house that is burning down and has a premonition of the world-historical destruction to come. There are a number of overblown sexual intrigues—Mária with the groom, Sándor with a factory worker in the city, Lajos with a maid, Ilona with one of her tutors—but for the most part the book’s story is just the well-rehearsed story of the twentieth century. Hitler comes to power; Lajos, by now a regional administrator, reluctantly carries out the Nazis’ orders, consigning the local Jewish population to death; Ilona and her husband flee to America by way of Switzerland. The war ends, and marauding Russians confiscate the family estate. The Lázárs work on a farm, then move to a cramped apartment in Budapest and take menial jobs in the mines and the post office. In the final scene of the book, Eva and Pista make their way over the Swiss border to freedom, as Biedermann’s grandparents did.
All this is so familiar that reading “Lázár” is like visiting a museum of older novels. The scenes in which Russian invaders ravage rural Hungary might have come from “All for Nothing,” Walter Kempowski’s 2006 masterpiece about the Eastern Front; the scenes in which Lajos mocks Ilona for fretting so anxiously about Hitler might have come from “The Oppermanns,” Lion Feuchtwanger’s 1933 portrait of a Jewish family who cannot decide whether to leave Berlin as Nazism intensifies. Biedermann’s Communist Budapest is a kind of composite of the cities depicted in Eastern European novels about life under Communism, like Bohumil Hrabal’s Prague in the riotous 1976 novella “Too Loud a Solitude” or Ivan Klíma’s Prague in “Love and Garbage” (1986). In one scene early in “Lázár,” Ilona lies in her room at the family summer house, luxuriating in the sense that time has stalled. “Whenever she lay in bed like this, everything was like the year before,” Biedermann writes. “Lázár” invites us to lie in bed—and relish the fantasy that everything is as it was the century before. We have only to look outside to see a mythic Austria-Hungary restored.
The book’s ambivalent nostalgia has not kept it from succeeding prodigiously. On the contrary, “Lázár” has topped the German best-seller list for twenty-nine weeks and is set to be translated into more than twenty-five languages. Naturally, Tom Tykwer, co-creator of the prestige period drama series “Babylon Berlin,” is planning to adapt it into a movie. Indeed, the novel’s antiquated air is the basis of its somewhat chintzy appeal: “People found it interesting that the book is stylistically, linguistically old-fashioned,” Biedermann told an interviewer at the New York Times. He wrote it by hand. I was almost surprised he didn’t use a quill.
For what, in the end, could be quainter than Biedermann himself? He joins a vaunted tradition of wunderkinder, mythologized at least as much for their precocity as for their actual work. The writer Novalis was well established as one of the brightest lights of German Romanticism when he died at twenty-eight, and Thomas Mann began the astonishing “Buddenbrooks” (1901) at the age of twenty-two and finished it three years later. The inevitable Mann comparisons arrived on schedule. In the Süddeutsche Zeitung, a reviewer wrote of Biedermann (in my translation), “One might think, good God, is he the new Thomas Mann, and are the Lázárs his Buddenbrooks?”
It is hard for me to imagine how one could think anything of the sort. Of course, it is refreshing to see a revival of the sprawling, maximalist mode that Mann mastered. “Lázár” and its popularity are nothing if not a resounding rejoinder to the thin, tart works of auto-fiction that have been so beloved of late—the bloodlessly autobiographical books that Joyce Carol Oates once derided as “wan little husks.” As one reviewer remarked in the Telegraph, the book’s smash success “shows that the drab realism of too many millennials doesn’t cut it for the generation now coming of age.”
I hope that’s true. Biedermann’s fiction appeals in large part because it is so unapologetically fictional—because it is outfitted with all the accoutrements of the traditional novel. “Lázár” has a plot (a luxury that many of the meandering autobiographical meditations of recent years have dispensed with), a cast of fractious characters, and an ambitious frame of reference. It is full of endearing if unsubtle allusions to Mann, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Proust, and more. And, when Biedermann is at his least flashy and most meticulously observant, he can write scenes that seethe with reality. Sándor catches sight of a woman jostling by on the street and falls in love with a mole on the back of her neck: “The sudden thought that the tiny brown blemish made this inconspicuous woman different from every other woman in this world made him forget his business appointment and follow her flowing coat.”Later, when Britain declares war on Germany, Lilly is standing naked in the bathroom getting ready for the day. Suddenly, irrelevantly, she “realized she was naked. She could not be naked at a moment like this!”
But these quiet intimacies are overwhelmed by fussy images that make little sense, as when winter is “galloping” toward the family “like a wild horseman with an icy sword,” and by the unfortunate outbreak of verse in the middle of the book (“The dense, brown foliage is already in the trees. But the dust of summer still glistens in the breeze”). On the whole, “Lázár” is showily but hollowly gothic. The characters are antiques dressed as human beings, and their traumas pile up without consequence. Mária cuts her arms with a razor “so I know I’m still alive” and wanders into a lake with stones in her pockets in ostentatious imitation of Virginia Woolf; Lajos is molested with a candle by his schoolmates; Sándor’s brother loses his mind, and the family locks him up in his room in the mansion. A handful of these upheavals seem to stick—“Lázar” is almost gratuitously full of sexual assaults, some of which leave their victims in enduring agony—but for the most part, tragedy is no more than a set piece. Its few lasting effects are impersonal and clichéd. Ilona sleeps for “twenty-six hours” after she disappears into the forest and returns inexplicably injured; Mária sleeps for “six days on end” after the family tutor is murdered.
Like the prestige television shows that take viewers to a stylized eighteen-eighties New York or nineteen-twenties Berlin, “Lázár” is less of a reflection on the present than a sentimental escape from it. Souvenirs of a romanticized fin-de-siècle Ruritania are presented without interest or elaboration. The obligatory sanatoria are visited, the obligatory spa towns are frequented, the obligatory Freudian analyst is consulted. These paths, like the rest of the book’s warren of byways, take us nowhere. Minor characters are introduced, then dropped. Lajos’s transparent skin, initially so intriguing, does not end up mattering or meaning anything. Reading “Lázár” is like running on a treadmill. There is a great deal of frantic activity, but no progress, and we end up exactly where we began.
The “Buddenbrooks” comparison is implausible because Mann really did renovate the literary possibilities of his time. His novels, especially the later ones, were rigorous, ecstatic immensities unlike anything that anticipated them. But Mann is anomalous, to put it mildly, and “Buddenbrooks” is the rare exception to a general principle. Dolly Parton famously quipped, “It costs a lot of money to look this cheap.” Well, it takes a lot of moldering to muster a little freshness. Funnily enough, “making it new” tends to be an old person’s game. Fiction written by very young writers, even the best ones, is almost never good. Saul Bellow’s début, “Dangling Man,” published when he was twenty-nine, is the worst of his many books; there is a reason that the novel Henry James completed at the age of twenty-eight, “Watch and Ward,” is rarely mentioned.
One of the worst things that can happen to a young and evidently talented author is to be lauded too enthusiastically too soon. Hopefully, Biedermann will not be spoiled by his plaudits. He has plenty of writing ahead of him and, God willing, plenty of time to make some of it genuinely new. ♦