Tamas Dobozy

This has a lot of emotional weight – all the stories were very textbook short story, in that they created a tiny, encapsulated emotional world and many of them ended in an epiphany. But – and there's always a but with me – I felt that first, there was too much similarity of theme and second, and more important, that there was a certain lack of compassion for his characters.

He creates sad people – people who know they're sad; people who don't and find out over the course of the story; people who write elaborate fictions to conceal the fact that they're sad from themselves and others. So what's the problem? You can write sad characters in sympathy, because you're a sad person, and you want to show that there's a little sadness and self-delusion in all of us, or you can write them as a voyeur, to peek into sad little lives as though through the windows of a dollhouse, or to show the reader that they aren't like the characters, to make the reader feel better, because they're not delusional in the way that a boy creating doomsday machines because he can't handle his parents' divorce is.

And it's true that a lot of them are about showing that a lot of self-conception is self-delusion, which is necessary – "It was nice for you, for a while, thinking differently about yourself?" Father Szent-Mihály asks in "The Miracles of Saint Marx," even though it was because of a lie he told. But there's always that sense that Dobozy doesn't feel it himself.

As to similarity of theme, Dobozy does very well writing stories that are about being an immigrant in a way that aren't explicitly about being an immigrant, even when the main characters are immigrants. What I mean is that feeling like you're the loose tooth in an otherwise perfect row (too smart; too dumb; just not the same; missing something; feeling displaced in what should be home) isn't a uniquely immigrant experience, though being an immigrant can exacerbate it, and Dobozy made me feel that intensely.

But all of them are about that or about the stories people tell about themselves or both, so the collection as a whole feels tonally monotone. Do we need all of these stories? At almost 350 pages, it's a fairly long collection and doesn't need padding. I'm not sorry I read all of them, but it does feel like a surfeit, especially since incidents seem to repeat across stories.

If you can ignore worries about his compassion, and if you spread your reading out a lot, though, it's very good. His prose is beautiful, and his insights into people's minds and relationships are cutting and real. I just wish there had been a little more selectivity, so that the discontent wouldn't have had time to brew and ferment.… (mer)

This book is really well written but just to difficult (for me) to engage with it. All the stories are intertwined and centred around the awful awful siege of the city of Budapest. It's evident from this book that every Hungarian alive at that time in History must have been affected in a devastating way. Themes of survival, (and the accompanying survival guilt,) betrayal, revenge, cowardice, identity, despair, and a very dark humour are woven throughout. I don't need a book to "feel good" necessarily but I do look for some transcendence, some hope, something to keep me from despairing. So let me describe it this way: I respect this work of fiction but I did not "like" it and I wouldn't recommend it.… (mer)

There are three major literary prizes for fiction in Canada: the Rogers Writer’s Trust, the Giller, and the Governor General Literary Awards. This book won the first, for 2012 and it was, in my opinion, the best of all three winners.

This is a collection of thirteen short stories set in Budapest during the siege of December of 1944 by the Red Army, and in Canada, the USA and parts of Europe as survivors and relatives and descendants of survivors deal with the psychological effects of the siege which, in a number of cases, set patterns of lives and relationships whether or not those were fully understood.

Dobozy describes well the physical horrors of the Soviet "liberation", especially in his exploration of the moral ambiguities involved in how individuals reacted to the collapse of society and the imposition of a new political structure and ethos....with the panoply of reactions that one always finds in moments of such crisis from those who hold onto a moral compass, to those who bend to the wind, to those who embrace it and exploit it for their own ends; the latter perhaps as a matter of survival but also, for many, for the opportunities for advancement too often at the cost of deceit and betrayal. The ultimate irony of course, as so often happened in the Soviet experience, was that no one was safe and even the most "committed" party supporters could be destroyed often under the guise of political or "class" cleansing but really driven by jealousies, animosities, greed and fear. Because in the final analysis, it all comes down to people.

The stories also explore how a horrific experience such as the siege has immediate and generational effects. People who lived through the trauma were often scarred for life and internalized the experience; how could one discuss, much less explain, such events to anyone who had not gone through something similar; but even with such a kindred soul, every individual has his/her own story and his/her own effects both conscious and unconscious. And the survivors carry generational effects of the trauma into relationships with children and families and lovers and friends and colleagues. The siege itself was a time-limited and now historical event; numbers of dead can be counted, but the broader human costs and effects are incalculable. One can understand why survivors want to look forward, even if they cannot excise their own ghosts, but the loss of heritage and identity because individual and family histories are suppressed or denied or incomplete or manufactured is one of the generational costs, especially if discovered later in life. And then there are the stories people invent for themselves to rationalize behaviour, to exculpate themselves, or to cope with pain and how these stories become "truth" indistinguishable from "the truth" but even the latter can often not be defined because of the effects of time and memory and motives.

I recall the words of Joachim Fest in his memoir, Not Me, when he said:

“…what the memory has preserved is never, strictly speaking, what happened. The past is always an imaginary museum. One does not, in retrospect, record what one has experienced, but what time—with increasing shifts in perspective, with one’s own will to create a shape out of the chaos of half-buried experiences—has made of it. By and large, one records less how it actually was than how one became who one is. And that is not only the weakness, but the justification of memoirs.”

Much of this plays out in the difficult and sometimes tormented lives of Dobozy’s characters.

Finally, there is always the question of moral judgement: we all like to think that we would do the "right" thing, but until we are faced with the circumstance, none of us really knows. And, in fact, those who hold onto a moral compass in the face of sometimes overwhelming pressure, are the rare ones.… (mer)