Rudolf UngváryBalatoni nyaralÃ3

Books in Review portray how literary epics reflect the human mind and how the evolution of language itself is embedded within these epics. The author illustrates how epics as an imaginative experience had the ability to respond to the crises of their times and to shape the challenges of each historic era— for example, literary epics in the Western world played a significant role in the formation of culture by orienting people’s thinking toward moral, theoretical, and ethical questions. Swaroop addresses the major European epics by Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Milton, along with passages of Indian poetry from Valmiki, Vyasa, Kālidāsa, and from Kannada poets such as Pampa. The monograph highlights the importance of poets connecting the past and the future by rewriting their literary tradition with a modern spirit that copes with the social and political challenges in each age; a mission , according to the author, Virgil and Dante successfully accomplished by providing visionary perspectives that resonate in the modern era. The author also aims to question the limitations that blocked the way of Indian culture to revisit its cultural models and to bring up social and political changes. For instance, the social and the political are highly dominant in Vyasa’s Mahabharata and Valmiki’s Ramayana through their thematic and stylistic aspects, and many successive poets adapted these two major epics differently to reflect on the human values of their time. Yet the author is critical of undermining a modern reading for these Indian epics and their adaptations. Indian epics represent an accumulation of creativities and geniuses where human transformations in Indian culture were documented with subtle details through which modern critics and readers can grasp a historical sense that embraces present-day social and political issues. Swaroop depicts how a genuine revision and revaluation of literary models, beyond the jargon of East and West, revitalizes the forces of humanism since a humanizing reading of epics can always bring dynamism back to its reading culture instead of restraining its potential within the same placid state in the past. Laila Zaitoun Western University London, Ontario Rudolf Ungváry Balatoni nyaraló Budapest. Jelenkor. 2019. 248 pages. FAMILY SAGAS HAVE recently become fashionable in Hungary. Following Péter Nádas’s excellent semi-autobiography (see WLT, March 2018, 94), Rudolf Ungváry has now produced the saga (documentary fiction ?) of a family that, toward the end of the narrative, slowly becomes part of his own life. The central theme of Balatoni nyaraló (Villa at Lake Balaton) is the story of the Lessners, a family of Jewish winegrowers who moved from Germany to Tapolca at the beginning of the seventeenth century and by 1815 began to build the largest wine cellar in this provincial town near Lake Balaton. Ungváry follows the fortunes of the family through its numerous descendants up to today while investigating the profound changes that affected Hungarian society in the meantime. The freely meandering narrative focuses on the history of Lessner Villa, a summer house built by Mór Lessner in 1885, but in doing so the author enumerates the dramatic social and political changes that happened in the past century. As a result of these, the Lessners lost their hard-earned property, first due to the actions of the Hungarian Fascists and their German allies and then due to the postwar Communist regime, imposed upon the country by the Soviets. Describing the fate of some of the Lessners, Ungváry cannot restrain himself from commenting on their false perception of reality: “It is risky when one mistakes reality too much with the version of reality as one sees it.” In other words, very often overtly optimistic blueprints for the future simply do not match “objective” reality. If somebody of the Jewish faith or of Jewish origin (the Nazis’ Nuremberg Laws drew few distinctions between the two) judged the situation realistically in 1938, he or she had a good chance of surviving the Holocaust ; if, on the other hand, he believed the promises of Hungarian politicians, he would more likely perish in Buchenwald or Auschwitz. Balatoni nyaraló follows the technique of W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz in peppering the text with photographs of villas and

Aesthetics · Art · Linguistics · Literature · Poetry · Political science · Politics · Rewriting · History · Indian History and Philosophy · Law · Leadership, Courage, and Heroism Studies · Philosophy · Values and Moral Education