Attila Bartis

Tranquility is anything but. This is an intense novel about a writer and his mixed up life. It gets racy, it gets emotionally violent, it has moments of pure insanity, but it is very, very good at all that it does. I was often finding myself drawn deeply into the emotion of the main character, the author who is dealing with his elderly, nutty actress-mother and his love life that has gone awry because of said mother and his living conditions with her. You don't have to have experienced what the narrator has experienced in order to become emotionally attached to what has happened to him because of the wonderful way this book is written.

The plot jumps around a lot and there were times when I felt somewhat lost as to where I had stopped reading. Several times I found myself wondering if my bookmark slipped and was put back in a different page than I remembered, either because the words I were reading felt like exact copies of what I had read before or because I felt so totally lost between what had happened and what was happening that I feared I'd skipped some pages. This writing style is part of the charm of the book, however and after a time you become used to it for the most part, though I wouldn't say it was my favorite aspect of the story.

People unwilling to read about intense sexual situations should probably avoid this book, as there are interactions with prostitutes, lovers and the narrator's mother that can become quite graphic at times. However, if that is your only reason to avoid reading, you might want to blush your way through the meat of the story because the emotional journey of the book combined with the quality of the writing shouldn't be missed.… (más)

I believe that this is the Hungarian author’s first novel to be translated into English; and what a novel it is! There are many comparisons mentioned on the back of the book: Thomas Bernhard, Elfriede Jelinek, Strindbberg, Checkhov, Beckett, Camus, Sartre, Kundera, and Andrzej Stasiuk. I cannot understand the Beckett comparison, except for one very small scene late in the book. The comparison to Camus is probably related to the apathetic announcement of the mother’s death, in the opening of the novel (similar to “The Stranger”), but otherwise I don’t get the comparison. The comparison I would most agree with is Kundera, with the sex, and politics, etc.

I’ll just say that this is about a writer, living with his aging ex-actress insane mother, and their past. Wrought with imaginative similes and beautiful/absurd imaginings, this is a novel to be reckoned with.

I will just summarize with a paragraph from page 232 that really stood out for me about freedom.

“Whatever I know of freedom, I learned when I parted with Mrs. Berenyi and headed for Kalvin Square. If, by freedom we don’t mean the euphoria of test pilots or the right to vote or that we may judge and decide according to our moral standards, and our decision happens to coincide with our most secret desires and emotions. If freedom is not white paper with black ink on it; if it is not four taut strings or ten thousand organ pipes; if it is not a hermit’s cave and it isn’t the moment when God’s prop alarm clock stops and something bursts the ribcage. In short, it’s best if we imagine that freedom is the kind of condition in which nothing ties us to the world around us. We have no desires, passions, or fears, we might say neither aims nor aimlessness, and we even fail to register that this vacuum no longer bothers us. Freedom is an odd, mainly characterless condition. It has nothing to do with indifference, which is inevitably cynical, and it has nothing to do with a state of it-all-comes-down-to-the-same-thing because behind that state still lurks some shame or hope. If everything comes to the same thing, that’s still very human. I might put it this way: freedom is a condition unsuitable for humans.”… (más)