Skylark (New York Review Books Classics)
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Review
The most original, economical and painful novel I have read in a long time. --Victoria Glendinning, The Times (London)
Kosztolanyi tells his story with its theme of ambivilance with a jaunty, lightness of touch that succeeds in conveying the sadness of small lives and the huge sorrows that determine them. --Irish Times
Kosztolanyi tells his story with its theme of ambivilance with a jaunty, lightness of touch that succeeds in conveying the sadness of small lives and the huge sorrows that determine them. --Irish Times
Leslie Wilson, Independent on Sunday -1994
"A classic worth discovering."
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
11 of 11 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
The plot of this novel is simple: Skylark, unmarried and not employed other than in the domestic arrangements of her family home, is persuaded to spend a week with relatives, leaving her ageing parents to fend for themselves. Freed from the stranglehold of her management and prejudices, they dine in restaurants, visit the theatre, stay up all night, and in the last hours before meeting Skylark at the train station scramble to return everything to its place and destroy all evidence of the high life they have led. It's a nice reversal of the more familiar situation of the young running to wild excess whilst parents are away.
Events are firmly anchored in time and place: the week from Friday 1st to Friday 8th September 1899 in the Hungarian town of Sárszeg, a fictionalised form of Subotica, the author's place of birth. By the time Skylark was written (first published 1924), the "war to end all wars" had swept away the easy-going, optimistic way of life described. Gone too was the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and Hungary had been deprived of two-thirds of its territory. Subotica had been attached to Serbia, a part of Yugoslavia. Skylark is a warts and all but very loving portrait of life in Hungary's second largest town in the last years before the cataclysm.
The closing pages of the book draw us into reflecting that although the triangular family relationship has been restored, it cannot be indefinitely sustained. Neither was Mother and Father's binge sustainable. Nor was it desirable that the life of the town as described should be sustained for ever, even if that were possible. Yet the new order that replaced it could hardly be said to have been better, and the conflagration of transition from the old to the new (of which we pick up just a hint in the narrative) was immeasurably worse. A relatively easy read of less than 60,000 words, this is a thought provoking novel.
Events are firmly anchored in time and place: the week from Friday 1st to Friday 8th September 1899 in the Hungarian town of Sárszeg, a fictionalised form of Subotica, the author's place of birth. By the time Skylark was written (first published 1924), the "war to end all wars" had swept away the easy-going, optimistic way of life described. Gone too was the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and Hungary had been deprived of two-thirds of its territory. Subotica had been attached to Serbia, a part of Yugoslavia. Skylark is a warts and all but very loving portrait of life in Hungary's second largest town in the last years before the cataclysm.
The closing pages of the book draw us into reflecting that although the triangular family relationship has been restored, it cannot be indefinitely sustained. Neither was Mother and Father's binge sustainable. Nor was it desirable that the life of the town as described should be sustained for ever, even if that were possible. Yet the new order that replaced it could hardly be said to have been better, and the conflagration of transition from the old to the new (of which we pick up just a hint in the narrative) was immeasurably worse. A relatively easy read of less than 60,000 words, this is a thought provoking novel.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
12 reviews
18 of 20 people found the following review helpful
Kosztolanyi's best novel
9 April 2004
Format:Paperback
This is an unusually fine short novel which conveys the spirit of life in small town Hungary at the turn of the 19th-20th centuries. If you are unsure where to start with Kosztolanyi, I would read Skylark first and then move on to Anna Edes or his short fiction.
22 of 26 people found the following review helpful
Simply Stunning
23 Jun 1998
Format:Paperback
I generally agree with what the previous reviewer has stated, although I found this short novel (as well as Anna Edes) brilliant and almost totally flawless. A book which I didn't want to finish simply because I truly enjoyed the experience of reading it.
11 of 12 people found the following review helpful
"A Perfect Novel"
2 May 2010
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
I found out about this little gem through Deborah Eisenberg's review in The New York Review of Books and would send anyone interested to that website for her own eloquent praise. "A perfect novel," she called it, and not only writes extensively and effusively about it but submits to an online interview in its cause.
There is originality in the conception and plot of the novel, wonderful descriptive passages, and, even rarer, an unremitting honesty in the author's treatment of his characters. We are not allowed to look down from a distant perch at these small-town, constrained people with their modest and circumscribed lives, nor, as they become close and vivid to us, are they elevated to heroic or even special status. Kosztolanyi avoids the formulae of tragedy, pathos, and (despite the chapter headings and humor) farce, nor is he content to serve up social science, fraught with self-justifying psychological and sociological descriptions. We are presented with an account that invokes all those genres, but finally is a synthesis, is nuanced and fully, compassionately human.
I would leave it to Ms Eisenberg to provide more detail than that, but having great esteem for her own short stories, I myself didn't require it. Every line of this slender volume counts, and to describe it overmuch seems almost beside the point.
There is originality in the conception and plot of the novel, wonderful descriptive passages, and, even rarer, an unremitting honesty in the author's treatment of his characters. We are not allowed to look down from a distant perch at these small-town, constrained people with their modest and circumscribed lives, nor, as they become close and vivid to us, are they elevated to heroic or even special status. Kosztolanyi avoids the formulae of tragedy, pathos, and (despite the chapter headings and humor) farce, nor is he content to serve up social science, fraught with self-justifying psychological and sociological descriptions. We are presented with an account that invokes all those genres, but finally is a synthesis, is nuanced and fully, compassionately human.
I would leave it to Ms Eisenberg to provide more detail than that, but having great esteem for her own short stories, I myself didn't require it. Every line of this slender volume counts, and to describe it overmuch seems almost beside the point.
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