Not Art

First, and to some most importantly, the writing in this book is genius. Those tell-tale signs of literary genius--shocking metaphor, sharp character, the lens of reality twisted just so--are all prevalent throughout the novel/memoir. "In that cheap silence, amid the slurping of the machines keeping my mother alive, my mother's body alive, I recalled her laughter, my mother's rarer than rare laughter. Smiling, yes--she's smiling like a barley loaf on the oven peel: this rather less often--a cheerful glance, yes, but laughter, that was rare" (p. 12). Look at the layers in those two sentences. Sadness, wry humor, and a subtle fury for her death; the merging of past and present; the outrageous comparison of his mother's smile to a loaf of bread. The book is full of gems like this. There's no plot to speak of. To enjoy this book, you'd have to read it something like a Proust novel--not try to follow the story (or lack thereof) but enjoy the narrator's witticisms, his character sketches and neurotic rehashing of events. It's records the narrator's memories of the day-to-day life in communist Hungary, but I found there were moments of real terror throughout. Repressed terror, of course. Just as the author also expresses repressed sexuality (homo and hetero), repressed guilt, and most of all, repressed anger at his mother, which really only comes through in the ending pages, some of the most powerful in the book. Make no mistake; this narrator is angry, although he tries to hide it by dancing from subject to subject, hysterically repeating himself and cloaking his prose in mixed memories that layer over one another until the reader may get lost. And the reader does get lost. Unless the reader is steeped in the literature, culture and soccer players of 1960s Hungary, the reader will get very lost. This can be discouraging, but it's part of the point of the novel. Esterhazy clearly, almost blatantly wrote this novel for himself, daring others to make sense of it. I found it interesting because the narrator's character is fascinating to absorb. I also found the book difficult to get through due to its incohesiveness. Recommended, but only to those with a great deal of literary patience.

In Budapest, the narrator knows his nonagenarian mom is ill, but still retains her incredible lust for living life to the fullest. He looks back over the decades to his childhood and early adulthood playing soccer. He recalls the Communist abuse towards his family due to their surname and his vivacious mom used soccer for her and her family to overcome the brutality from the State. She befriended the Hungarian players even knowing that at least one member of the team was an informant because that was a way of life under the Communists. This is an odd well written but difficult to follow drama that reads sort of like a series of vignettes that tie together as a biographical fiction. The narrator looks back on his life and the most influential person in it over the decades, his mom and her life as helped her family survive the brutal regime through her soccer connections. Told in twelve short stories, Not Art is for fans of something totally different as Peter Esterhazy provides a deep look at Hungary under Communist rule and beyond through apparently a glimpse into his family history inside of the bigger soccer field. Harriet Klausner