The Rebels

I was lucky enough to read Sándor Márai's The Rebels while traveling through Budapest, Bratislava, and Prague. This was part of my standing rule of reading a novel from the country you are visiting while traveling. In paid off well with Stevenson in the UK and Strindberg in Sweden. It did not serve me well with Bowles in Morocco. In the case of Márai it was a perfect fit. Having had my feet on the ground, mangling the Hungarian language in my worst attempts at communicate with the locals, I experienced the feeling of Budapest for myself. There is a mellowness and peace to Hungarians these days. It may be due to the fact that until recently, Hungary was constantly being conquered by one empire or military power after another. The Turks, Habsburgs, Nazis, and Stalinists all took their turn. For a brief period, leading up to and into World War I, Hungary merged with Austria, forming the second largest country in Europe. However, the defeat of the central powers in World War I, including Austria-Hungary, lead to 70 years of dark days for the country. It is at that stumbling point -- Austria-Hungary's entry in the war -- that Márai sets the book, having experienced first hand the embarrassing (for Hungarians) dissolution of the dual monarchy and its multi-ethnic society. I state all this not to drone on about trivia, but to point out the context of The Rebels and the historical reality of what Márai experienced at the time of the writing the novel. For some reason, Americans don't seem to `get' The Rebels. I've seen reviews where readers say the book is too foreign to enjoy, have labeled Márai as anti-Semitic and homophobic, and even more absurd, state that they cannot relate to the characters because they are all adolescent males. Take that Holden Caulfield. These sad misperceptions of The Rebels cause these readers to miss out on what is a superb novel. Dated, perhaps. Esoteric to western culture? No more than any Russian novel. Anti-everything-under-the-sun? Considering that Márai pined for multi-ethnic and multi-cultural Hungary in his Memoir of Hungary, was highly critical of the Nazis (a dangerous stance under the Arrow Cross Government), and soundly against the subsequent puppet-communist regime installed by Stalin, it is very doubtful the book has a prejudice against anything except oppression and senseless death. As the title suggests, the focus of the book is rebellion. In this case, four childhood friends who, fearing their subsequent banishment to the front lines of World War I, engage in a very adolescent form of rebellion, starting with lying, but eventually moving on to mind games, and out-and-out theft. The friends -- Ábel, Tibor, Ernò, and Béla -- are snapshots of Hungarian youth at that time. The first a wealthy (but disassociated) son of a doctor, the second an almost too beautiful and unrugged son of a colonel, the third a lower class son of a disfigured cobbler, the fourth an irresponsible son of a shopkeeper. At the start of

It is the early summer of 1918 near the end of the First World War. A pretty town in the Hungarian part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire is far away from the battle front, but the war, now obviously being lost, seeps into it. Mutilated soldiers return home. And boys who have just finished school are expecting to be called up and sent to fight. Four of them have formed a close-knit gang, who spend their last weeks desperately clinging to what is left of their adolescence and in rebellion against the adult world. They create for themselves a `reality' which is separate from the `reality' of the outside world - sometimes they do it by competing with each other in telling lies about themselves, sometimes in telling truths. One form the rebellion takes is stealing money from their families on a large scale - not because they particularly want the articles they buy with it, but more as a gesture of defiance. Half in and half out of this little group are a couple of adults. One is the elder brother of one of the four who has returned from the war as a one-armed invalid. The other is an actor who, with professional skill, finds just the right tone with the young people, which to some extent disarms their suspicions of him as an adult. The emotions of the four and the relationships between them are described with subtlety and elegance, with a powerful and unexpected twist at the end. We see the adults through the eyes of the boys: there are very strong visual images of them. Sometimes the description of the town's inhabitants reminded me of Dylan Thomas' Llareggub - not least in one passage when the town is bathed in moonlight. Often there are strong evocations of smell. There are occasional strange stream-of-consciousness passages, relating sometimes to the thoughts of the characters, while at other times they are authorial. There is a long set-piece episode in an empty theatre in which the actor manipulates a series of transformations in himself, the boys and the scenery; the boys are like puppets under his influence. It makes compelling reading, though at the time the significance these pages is unclear until the powerful end of the book. Despite the realism of the descriptions, an enigmatic air hovers over the whole book. Its construction is not as straightforward as that of Marai's later novels, `Embers' and `Conversations in Bolzano' (see my reviews), and so it makes a rather more difficult read. And again, as in the two later books, the translation by George Szirtes is admirable.

I liked this book...you think you have the characters pegged and then suprises...reminds me of another Hungarian book...Pal Utcai Fiuk...I find the cover photo mesmerizing...wickedly impish:)

This is the third Marai novel translated into English, and like his previous two (Embers and Conversations at Bolzano) he has a knack for bringing to life an historical and social context (a country town in Hungary, late in the first world war). But for my tastes this novel was not as satisfying as its two translated predecessors. Yes, the subject matter is different (the difficult and dangerous transition from adolescence to adulthood), but some of the central characters lack a certain clarity and depth. The novel's power lies, however, in the skill in which the apparently peripheral characters are delineated (and here I mean the Cobbler, who seems to step into the story from a nineteenth-century Russian novel or short-story, and Tibor's mother), characterisations that are rich but also leave one wanting to know more. For me they save the novel. The last fifty pages or so are worth the wait. I look forward to the next translation.

In their final year of high school four boys - Abel, Tibor, Bela and Ernö - form a gang. It is May of 1918, the month of their graduation. Their nation (the Hungarian half of the Dual Monarchy) has plans for them - they will be conscripted, given only cursory training, and thrown into the battle-lines of one of the war's lethal fronts as hapless cannon fodder. They may be facing death in the near future. Another distasteful possible future presents itself to them in the person of Lajos, Tibor's older brother who participates in the gang as a senior observer and counselor; he has returned from the Isonzo battleground missing an arm. He is angry, he fears the future, he pities himself, and he conspicuously refuses to "convert" to full adult life. He is an able co-conspirator in the gang's activities, the purpose of which is to wage their own war against adult society, which they fear and despise. They hate authority in each of its incarnations, understanding that its purpose is to either intimidate them (the patriarchal fathers) or plead with them (the pathetic mothers and aunts). They sense that the adult world is withholding secrets and privileges from them but also suspect that when uncovered and experienced, these secrets and privileges will prove to be utterly banal. Parents and teachers are special objects of their wrath and disenchantment. The members of the gang steal, lie, smoke, drink and engage in elaborate hoaxes upon selected adult townsmen. They have even rented quarters in a shabby inn on the outskirts of the city as a hide-out and storage bin for their loot. Much of their stolen money is spent on fanciful objects which are never used or displayed - indeed, the wastefulness of their acquisitions is a conscious element of the gang's overarching principle, which is that each act of their war justifies itself because of the grandeur of their purpose and the unworthiness of their enemies. Yet they remain tentative and uncertain if their risky "games" are truly meaningful or merely a desperate attempt to hang on to the comforts of childhood which have already vanished. Recently they have formed a strange alliance with an adult whose life and manners, like their "games", seem to gainsay the solid middle-class virtues which they flee and mock. This is the "strolling player" and stage-director Amadé Volpay. He is a large, perfume-scented, epicene creature who enjoys being the center of their attentions when he tells the boys tales of his adventures or when he comments dryly on their new way of life, analyzing without judging; he is not above accepting handouts and gifts from them. The actor also has an open (yet secretive in its aims) connection with the town's pawnbroker, Havas, who, obscenely fat and coarse in his habits while delicate and respectful in his language, both repels and fascinates the boys. As petty thieves they also have recourse to his services, establishing an asymmetrical bond which may prove to be one