Gyula Krúdy

"That Dreadful Hungarian?" says Mrs. Pearce, "was he there?" I guess I share some of Mrs. Pearce's insularity and unease with a people she doesn't understand. Granted, I like Bartok a lot, and I've enjoyed a good deal of John Lukacs, even though I have always suspected he is laying it on a little for effect.

In just this vein, I can't quite figure out what to make of Gyula Krúdy and in particular of his "novel" Sunflower which comes to me from NYRB with Lukacs' enthusiastic endorsement. I say "novel," because I'm not quite certain whether it is that, or "meditation" or a "romance," or an extended parlor trick designed tto amuse the cogniscenti and leave the yokels (that would be me) gaping.

Like it or not, you'd have to say that Krúdy is "overheated," and that seems to be the point. Apparently he feels he can't tell the story of his homeland without turning off the air conditioner and turning on the exhaust fan. It's also wonderful in a way, though I guess it is a way that you would have to call, well, Hungarian:

It was a May twilight, when all things appear to be full of life and purpose, and there was nothing and no one moribund or suicidal near the golden, dusty highway. Frogs had not yet struck up their evensong, although one or two concert masters in the reeds did sound a few tentative croaks, basso profundo. It was easy to see that within an hour the impromptu concert would be in full swing--and who knows why frogs sing? A bridal veil lowered over the sun's disk. A day in May is still whimsical and sentimental, like a young bride running her fingers over the wolflike backbone of a man. She distributes her kisses equally among highwaymen, hanged men, deep ditches and coldhearted old birches. She belongs to everyone and no one. Meanwhile at nightfall the clouds are ascending so that rain might start to fall round about midnight, tapping and palpating like a physician, examining roof tiles, people's dreams, and checking the resonance of windowpanes. The rain swishes over meadows, dallies with the flowering trees, speeds up and slows down, just like a skilled dancer; and plays by herself in the night, like an orphaned child. But still, this is May, and even the oldest crone would be startled to find death's ugly black spider hiding in her nightshirt.

--Gyula Krúdy, Sunflower 191-2(John Bátki Trans., 1997 NYRB)