Celestial Harmonies By Péter Esterházy
Free read Celestial Harmonies
The Esterházy family is one of the most ancient noble dynasties of Hungary. Their origins date back almost to the foundation of Hungary as an independent state in A.D. 1000. The family’s history is inextricably intertwined with the history of both Hungary and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. This more than 800-page tome consists of two books, simply called the 1st and the 2nd book, and provides the reader with insights into a deep reservoir of family tradition and memories.
In Book 1 Péter Esterházy shares anecdotes about the rich and often piquant history of his predecessors. The author zigzags in time without respecting any chronological order. In one chapter the Esterházys fight against the Habsburg during one of the Hungarian independence wars just so that the following chapter can find them as close and loyal allies to the Kaiser. Any chapter may depict the Esterházys fighting against the invading Turks with the same probability as describe how they had fun by composing music or flirting within their aristocratic circles. Some of the 371 chapters are limited to a few sentences while others amount to short novellas. I could identify only two common orientation points through this labyrinth of anecdotes. First, each chapter is written from the perspective of the author's daddy (’My daddy’). Great-great grandfathers or other ancient relatives of the author can equally manifest as 'my daddy'. 'My daddy' can also take the persona of a character from a given era, including modern times, who is unlikely to ever had connection with the Esterházys. Second, and this is a most remarkable thing about this book, the mood constantly swings between hilarity and complete heartbreak. Or it does not even swing but conjures both sentiments simultaneously. While reading the sometimes bizarre chapters I often had to smile, just to become morose a very few sentences later. And then repeated the same again and again.
Book 2 is a family history about the more recent but certainly not less turbulent events of the 20th century. The 20th century, in Hungary, meant the loss of WW1 along with the collapse and disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a quick period of red terror in 1919 followed by a revisionist government, the loss a WW2 as a satellite state to Nazi Germany, and then communism-socialism as a satellite state to the Soviet Union. From the dynastical perspectives of the aristocratic Esterházys it would be difficult to envision a more disruptive century. The author writes about his childhood memories, living through atrocities and enmities orchestrated against his blue-blooded parents. The Esterházys were the ideal targets and scapegoats to communist propaganda. Or perhaps not that perfect. They were aristocratic enough to be punished admirably but also too much ingrained in the country’s history, like living memorials, for the communist party to dare to exterminate them.
This book is about many things. First and foremost, it’s about family and it's a hymn to a delicate and sensitive father-son relationship. It's about religion and the individual’s identity vis-à-vis God. It shows history through the eyes of high aristocracy, their fight against losing anchors of identity, and their slide into depression and self-destruction. Love and intimacy are recurring topics just as the enormous suffering brought forward by Nazism, communism, anti-Semitism. It's beautifully written and Esterházy not only writes but plays and jokes with the words (caveat: I read it in Hungarian, my mother tongue, no idea how his playful use of words translates into other languages). The bittersweet, satirical tone is masterful. And this is one of those books where, despite my 5-star rating, I can readily understand 1-star, 2-star ratings by fellow readers. It’s certainly not everybody’s cup of tea. 9780060501082 Θεϊκό βιβλίο!
https://pepperlines.blogspot.gr/2017/... 9780060501082 This review needs some context. Péter Esterházy was born in 1950 in Budapest to one of the most notable noble families of former Austro-Hungarian monarchy. This novel is divided in two parts: the first one is a collection of sentences about Esterházy men since the formal foundation of the family around the end of the 16th century, while the second part has a structure more similar to that of a novel and tells the story of Péter himself, his father and his grandfather. I chose this book because I love reading about large families, but I was somewhat disappointed with Celestial Harmonies. If you are like me and don't know a thing about Hungarian history, Wikipedia'll come in handy. It has also an article about the Esterházy family that'll prove useful to have a clear family tree. This didn't make it an easy read. The writing didn't help either. While the style is flowing, precise, intelligent and a little demanding of the reader, it is too experimental for my taste. Sorry, but I can't bear reading page after page of descriptions of family heirlooms. I thought it would pay back somehow, but it didn't. The author talks about some of them all around the book, but that infamous list doesn't enhance the reader's experience in any way. This book was way too long, so long that I was weary before I had finished it.
However, I liked some things about the book. I liked the rythm created by the repetition of 'my father' or 'my dear father' in the first part and reading about how the most recent Hungarian history affected the Esterházys, especially about Hungary supporting nazis and then the Soviet republic. I would recommend to anyone who wants to read this book to think of it as a colossal monument to the Esterházy family, instead of a novel. I don't mean this is necessarily a bad book, I would say it is beautiful as a sculpture is. I guess this wasn't the right book for me, since this isn't what I expect of novels. 9780060501082 Esse livro foi o que escolhi para representar a Hungria na Volta ao Mundo em Livros.
Os Esterházys foram nobres húngaros importantes, condes, diplomatas, guerreiros, políticos. O seu palácio era conhecido como a Versalhes húngara. Eles são para os húngaros algo como os Kennedys, os Rotschilds e os Rockefellers, tudo em uma só família, segundo o próprio autor. Fora do país, são muito conhecidos como os patronos de Haydn. Durante o comunismo, perderam tudo. Péter Esterházy se voltou então à história de sua família para escrever o seu último romance, Celestial Harmonies.
Mas, como ele é o Esterházy, ele não tem interesse em fazer um história linear. Ele começa o livro com as “Numbered Sentences from the Lives of the Esterházy Family”, centenas de anedotas numeradas, todas sobre o mesmo personagem, “meu pai”. Usando apenas esse nome, ele conta histórias de família, sobre os Esterházy heróicos e os traidores, sobre suas relações com príncipes e imperadores, turcos, prisioneiros de guerra, aquele que matou a mulher para herdar sua fortuna, o que teve um ataque de gases em frente a tsarina Catarina (ela teria respondido “enfim um som sincero”), o que recebeu os russos, que ele chamava de bárbaros, no seu palácio. Outros “meus pais” são tirados de romances famosos, são figuras míticas, são paródias de Nabokov, Gombrowicz, Joyce, Musil, Sófocles, Calvino e dezenas de outros. Um é um dubl�� de corpo da Lady Di, um é o gato de Schröndiger.
“11 – I once had a distant, fascinating and intriguing father – let’s call my father by this name around whose crib there danced the last moon rays of the old century and the first shimmering light of a new dawn – the Evening Star, the Morning Star, the Star of the Even-Morn. That’s where our name comes from.“
“15 For fifty fillérs my father would eat a fly, for one florint you could take a picture of the cadaver in his tongue, for five florints and an apple (Starking), he’d bite a mouse in two. He never worked with outsourced mice, he liked to catch his own.”
“31 My father was a great warrior, an enemy commander, who had no peer in duel or warfare. (No peer in warfare, et cetera, I know! My mother.) Prince Rákóczi had great affection for him, as once he had slaughtered forty-two of the enemy in front of his very eyes. When the Prince was told that my father was planning to betray him, he refused to believe it.But he had to, because it was my mother who had denounced him, after he’d told her about his plan. My father ended up in front of a military tribunal, and the tribunal sentenced him to death for high treason. My mother didn’t shed a tear (…).”
“132 In the Eighteenth Century my father did away with religion, in the nineteenth century he did away with god, in the twentieth century, he did away with man.“
“152 My father, the man without qualities, slept with his older sister. Fuck it / him / her.”
“210 My father: a horse has four legs, and it still trips up. In the same way, the Danube has two banks, but they shot the Jews into it just the same.“
“237 Is my father capable of creating a boulder so large that he himself could not raise it?”
“266 (They found a clearing and, gun in hand, the two parties positioned themselves about thirty paces’ distance from each other in keeping with the custom of fighting a duel that many Hungarian writers, and pratically every Hungarian writer of aristocratic origin, have described in detail). I had an argument with a Stranger, father. It was nothing, really. I slapped him, and then he killed me in a duel near Kalugano. Please forgive me, my father wrote my grandfather in his last letter.”
“274 My father is just like Piero della Francesca’s father: metaphorical.”
A segunda parte se chama “Confessions of an Esterházy family”, em alusão às Confissões de um Burguês de Sándor Márai. Essa parte é mais linear, e foca em eventos importantes da vida do autor, seu pai, avô e bisavô, principalmente durante o comunismo. Essa parte pode ser descrita como o declínio de uma família – afinal, o autor disse uma vez que toda história de família depois de Thomas Mann é influenciada pelos Buddenbrook.
Esse romance foi publicado em 2001, mas não era cedo demais para dizer que é um dos maiores do século XXI. 9780060501082 (újraolvasás)
Egy Esterházy-olvasó utánaemlékezett egykori (azóta kiköltözött szoba, azóta nem frekventált ellenőrizetlen villamoson, azóta kijárt tantermek farvizén) olvasottaknak, most hogy nincs épp aktualitása (csak amennyi konstans aktualitása egy klasszikussá azonnaliasodó időtlen szövegnek) az újraviszketést tenyérileg már éreztem - de hol a könyv? Nem egy apró könyv, mégis elkerült. Úgyhogy kipecáztam gyorsan egy újat (használtat! újszerűt).
A többi már közvetlenebb olvasmányélmény, annak mindenki más is utána tud lapozni, nagyon érdemes, nem is csak mert móka és kacc, hanem az eközé módszeresen odaaprított világ, az a mikor milyen, komoly stb. az feltétlen látogatnivaló, újra is járható. Nagy, és nagyon jó könyv.
(Első HC-olvasóknak szintén föltétlen-kötelező-ajánlott föladvány utána a Javított kiadás, az egy olyan utózmány ami teljesen szinguláris a világirodalomban, de nem késztetődtem újraolvasására, mert egyszer már megvolt) 9780060501082
The Esterházys, one of Europe's most prominent aristocratic families, are closely linked to the rise and fall of the Hapsburg Empire. Princes, counts, commanders, diplomats, bishops, and patrons of the arts, revered, respected, and occasionally feared by their contemporaries, their story is as complex as the history of Hungary itself. Celestial Harmonies is the intricate chronicle of this remarkable family, a saga spanning seven centuries of epic conquest, tragedy, triumph, and near annihilation. Told by Péter Esterházy, a scion of this populous clan, Celestial Harmonies is dazzling in scope and profound in implication. It is fiction at its most awe-inspiring.
This P.S. edition features an extra 16 pages of insights into the book, including author interviews, recommended reading, and more. Celestial Harmonies
Hungarians are sexy motherfuckers. I have never read more heartbreak and hilarity in a single work. 9780060501082
Celestial Harmonies: (1990) All the world’s a stage art and pageantry in the Renaissance and baroque.Especially in its first part, reading Celestial Harmonies is like reading snippets from the life of demi-gods up there in Mount Olympus. The first person fragmented narrative goes anywhere you don’t know what the narrator will tell you next. It could be the chandelier, the contents of the treasure drawer, how much does the king-father loves his mother or his mistress, how the king father searches for his God, how does the father compare to God, etc. There are some bright and shining, amusing and amazing portions but there are also those that a mortal reader like me does not know anything about and just made me feel clueless or even bored. Wiki helped once in a while but there are just some parts that only maybe Hungarian readers know or can appreciate.
The book is thick, 880 pages and heavy, first class glossy paper with hardbound cover. Reading it for straight two whole days last weekend should have been an agony for my rheumatic hands but I persisted. Reason? I could not help but read because the life of this former Austro-Hungarian monarchy, the Ezterhazys was just amazingly interesting. It is like being there and watching how a royal, popular and respected European family fell down from their Mt. Olympus with even a member dying along the way because they were so poor. However, this book is not a tearjerker. The narration is strange. I think Peter Esterhazy (born 1950), a scion of the family who is now a mathematician, novelist and a freelance writer, did not write this novel to solicit sympathy. For me, this book just wants to show us how anybody who are rich and famous now could one day, find themselves as poor as rats in the gutters. But Esterhazy, did not, at least in this book, compare his father with the biblical character Job, although his father has deep faith in God and that this faith permeates as the underlying theme of this book. Esterhazy also did not put blame on anybody or anything in particular that led to his family’s downfall. He just tells the story just how it happened but he did not write it like a history book but metaphorically in a magical realism kind of way.
If a book has a gender, this is definitely a very manly book. It centers on fathers. Esterhazy used the word father not only in reference to God (the father) and his biological king-father but also his grandfather, or the father’s grandfather, uncles, older brothers, or any father for that matter. Particularly in the first part of the book, readers must decipher whose the father being referred to in some of the portions. It did not put me off, because of Esterhazy’s brilliant play of words; you just interpret his words for yourself. Suit it in any way you want, the outcome is still fascinating if not outright amazing especially when in the end the fragmented narrations fall into their right pieces of the Esterhazy’s long and arduous history as a family.
The second part provides a more focused approach as it details the occupation of Hungary by communist, followed by World War II and the eventual takeover of the Soviet Union. So, when you finally close the book, the anchored and definitive second half seems to be enhanced by the fragments of the first part. It like when you clean your leather shoes. If you just brush it without applying shoe polish, it feels like that when you are reading the second part. But as afterthought, if you apply some shoe polish, the shoes shine brighter. But Esterhazy’s style makes it unbelievably interesting because of the sequence: the shine comes first before the shoes. For me, this speaks well of how bright a novelist Esterhazy is.
9780060501082 An astonishing torque of history, memory and language. 9780060501082 Some periods of the last century were no less dark than the Dark Ages…
Fear and communists, everything here begins with them, and will end with them too, it seems.
Celestial Harmonies is a book of the earthly disharmonies and it consists of two parts:
The first half of a novel is a huge list of the probable author’s fathers that could exist since the medieval epoch… It is an exhaustive inventory of all possible father’s vices and sins and wrongdoings…
And Péter Esterházy, like the patent Oedipus, pitilessly kills all his hypothetical fathers all down the ages.
The second half is the family history proper…
There is the rule formulated by the author’s grandfather and the family abides by this rule…
People quickly grow tired of the good, look for something better, find something worse, then insist on it ever after for fear of something still worse to come.
Celestial Harmonies is an honest and merciless, full of dark sarcasm memorial to the odious era.
In the twentieth century, two planetary cataclysms happened: communism and fascism. 9780060501082 When my brother's knee was injured while into competitive sports (naks!) he was operated on at the St. Luke's Medical Center in Quezon City. On the day of his discharge from the hospital he requested me to pick him up as he couldn't then drive by himself.
I was able to immediately free myself from my other commitments that day so I drove to the hospital about an hour early. Not wanting to wait too long, I decided to drop by the Booksale store nearby. As I entered the store the first book I saw was this. Hardbound, pages as smooth as a baby's skin, with a borrower's card from the Floral Park Public Library, but without any indication at all that somebody has borrowed, used or read it before.
At that time, I was grappling with Donald Barthelme's The Dead Father. It would turn out later that the very last footnote in this book by Peter Esterhazy is his (Esterhazy's) special thanks to the estate of Donald Barthelme for giving him permission to quote extensively from
The Dead Father and his expression of admiration for Barthelme's writing.
After reading The Dead Father I didn't get to immediately read this book, though. I think I was sort of intimidated by its length and thickness, 846 pages in fine, small print. Somebody smacks you in the head with this and you may get a brain concussion. I thought it would be a tiring read. It was not.
What is this book all about? Hungary has a thousand-year history and among the greatest and most powerful aristocrats in this country's past were those of the Esterhazy family, counting among them several princes, military commanders, diplomats, bishops, counts and patrons of the arts. By the mid-20th century, however, the power, prestige and wealth of this family were gone. There was a brief communist takeover in 1919, then the second world war and the eventual Soviet rule. The Esterhazys became enemies of the people and succumbed to dispossession, resettlement and impoverishment.
The author's father was born into great wealth and privilege in 1919. But by the time the author himself was born in 1950 the family was already forced to share a house with another family and the author's father was earning very little doing one menial work after another. One of his four children even died while still a baby for lack of good nutrition and proper medical care.
A harrowing riches-to-rags theme, supposedly. But it was no tear-jerker. This is a novel of great MELANCHOLIC GAIETY.
Divided into two parts, Book 1 has 371 paragraphs of different lengths (from the very, very short to the very, very long). These paragraphs are all about fathers (or almost all, if I missed some which have nothing to do with fathers): the author's father, his father's father, all the other Esterhazy fathers past and present, some non-Esterhazy fathers (paragraph 139 is even about fathers in Philippines--so Pinoy fathers!). And these are fathers of all kinds: good fathers, bad fathers, heroic fathers, fathers who abuse their children, intelligent fathers, stupid fathers, weird fathers, Barthelme's Dead Father, etc.).
Book 2 is also numbered (from 1 to 201) but each of the numbers often have two or more paragraphs constituting a mini story. Here we find the story of the downfall of the Esterhazy family who had lost everything (their vast tracks of land, their servants, their palaces and money) except their values, dignity, love of life and--in the case of the author at least--their sense of humor.
Why Celestial Harmonies? Let me hazard a guess. The term celestial harmonies was used tongue-in-cheek around at least 3 times in the book (as far as I remember). But the real reason could be this: there is a collage of many different fathers here, and a ton of literary allusions, heavy borrowings of phrases and indirect quotes from works of authors like Barthelme, Samuel Beckett, Saul Bellow, Yasunari Kawabata, John Updike, Nabokov, James Joyce, Frank McCourt (!), Henry Miller, Kenzaburo Oe, George Orwell, Franz Kafka, etc. Great works and voices towering above us all. Celestial. Esterhazy found harmonies in all of them. So, Celestial Harmonies.
But that's just my opinion.
I have several favorite paragraphs (Esterhazy, I dunno, call them sentences) here. But let me quote here paragraph 189 from Book 1. Notice the biblical allusion (Moses' land flowing with milk and honey). Notice the sad theme of a father quarelling with the mother. Then notice the humor:
My father was about to strike my mother, something that--need we add--was nothing out of the ordinary, but then he just shook her head instead (presumably like Christ the shoemaker), and stormed out to the kitchen. He paced up and down, huffing and puffing, abusing my mother under his breath, who (my mother) had just made a general comment regarding the sadness she felt with respect to her life. (Not a reproach or accusation, just the realization of complete failure, which is a reproach and accusation.) My father ripped open the refrigerator door: three milks, one in a bottle, two in plastic bags. He slammed the bottle to the floor, the milk squirting all over the place. In the meantime he was already tearing at the plastic bag with his teeth, forcing the milk out, which squirted in his face, fuck! He fucked it down and trampled it underfoot along with the third bag. The kitchen was awash in the squeaking milk. He took the honey from the cupboard, one tube and one bottle. The bottle--as a matter of custom, we might say--bang!, to the floor, and meanwhile he was forcing the liquid gold from the tube. Drip and stick everywhere. It'd have been good, had my mother sneaked quietly, cautiously out to the kitchen, and watched him rage for a while, whirling round, shirttail hanging out of his pants, everything about him tentative, his gestures, his grimaces, his sentiments, and then she, too, could have joined him, trampling into the new, sweet terrain that was the kitchen, into the guck, and she could have embraced him, whispering, you, you...you land of milk and honey! Instead, my father stormed into the living room, pulled my mother off the sofa--she was huddled there, torn between tears and dry eyes--and as he shoved her toward the kitchen, he shouted, You are going off to the land flowing with milk and honey, but I will not go up in the midst of thee, for thou art a stiff-necked people, lest I consume thee in the way!
Peter Esterhazy wrote this book in his native language and it was translated to English by Judith Sollosy who wrote a short introduction to it in April 2003 for its publication in the United States ending with this statement:
I can't help thinking that when the Good Lord created the world in six days and took off for the Bahamas on the seventh, he made a bad mistake. And he knows it. And once in a while, in His infinite boredom, He looks down on us, feels sorry for our plight, and He sends us a Shakespeare, or a Mozart--or a book like 'Celestial Harmonies'.
And to think I bought this treasure at the Booksale for only Php145.00! 9780060501082