Deszo Kosztalanyi: Skylark

Dezso Kosztalanyi was a 'faithful lover' of Budapest and a passionate modernist, champion of Joyce, Kafka, Musil; editor, journalist, poet, novelist. Skylark is an apparently representative Kosztalanyi work, telling of an elderly couple devoted to their overweight, unattractive and aging daughter Skylark, and the surprising joys they experience when she goes away on a week's holiday. Hilarious and tragic, I've rarely encountered so funny a drama and so bleak a comedy. And what powers of description:

Her flesh was powdery and voluptuously weary,as if tenderised by all the different beds and arms in which she had lain. Her face was as soft as the pulpy flesh of an overripe banana, her breasts like two tiny bunches of grapes. She exuded a certain seedy charm, a poetry of premature corruption and decay. She breathed the air as if it burned her palate, baking her small, hot, whorish mouth. It was as if she were sucking a sweet or slurping champagne.

The couple hold an interesting position within the town, once welcomed and respected, they now lock themselves away with Skylark, enjoying calm domestic pursuits, eating blandly, abstaining. With her gone it's not long before they, almost reluctantly, start to fall off this wagon and enjoy themselves, re-establishing old friendships, gorging themselves at the restaurant, Mother shopping, Father smoking, drinking and gambling. But like all benders the end remains always in sight. This from an old friend and poet who follows them home and stays on to observe:

He could hear rummaging from inside the house, the old couple preparing for rest. And he could see quite clearly the wretched rooms, where suffering collected like unswept dust in the corners, the dust of lives in painful heaps, piled up over many long years. .. They had no tragedy, for how could tragedy begin to grow in such a wasteland? Yet how profound, how human they all were.

Of course, Skylark returns, and with it despair, resignation and hopelessness, for all parties. This is depicted metaphorically in the form of a pet bird Skylark has brought back from the country:

"Look, isn't he sweet? Tubi, Tubica. My dear little Tubica. Isn't he a darling?"
Seeing the electric light, the pigeon began scratching with its twisted, sooty feet, turning its stupid, harmless head and blinking at its new mistress with black peppercorn eyes.... It wasn't a pretty pigeon. It was a tatty, dishevelled little bird.

The catalogue of miseries, and tasty delights, is vivid and tactile, recalling Orwell, no doubt due in part to the excellent translation by Peter Esterhazy. Esterhazy also provides an insightful introduction to the book and a summary of Kosztalyani's life, written in a welcoming and idiosyncratically offbeat tone that suits the subject. After Skylark I'm very keen to read more Kosztalanyi, but Esterhazy's introduction makes him even more appealing, Especially with quotes from Kosztalanyi like this:

I have always been interested in just one thing: death. Nothing else. I became a human being when, at the age of ten, I saw my grandfather dead, whom at that time I probably loved more than anyone else. It is only since then that I have been a poet, an artist, a thinker. The vast difference which divides the living from the dead, the silence of death, made me realise I had to do something... For me, the only thing I have to say, however small an object I am able to grasp, is that I am dying.