Lázár by Nelio Biedermann

vThis has been dubbed a saga, and it has received much attention in Europe for its quirky and confident take on 20th-century Hungarian history, written by a Gen Z author who didn't live through any of it. The opening pages introduce us to a world straight out of gothic fable. In an isolated manor house by a forbiddingly dark forest, a strange-looking baby is born. This unearthly child, Lajos, is fated to carry forward the family name of the Lázárs, a noble dynasty with an alarming tendency to go mad, die violently, or both. Meanwhile, in another wing of the house lurks the baron’s older brother, Imre, who is barred from the baronetcy by reason of insanity. Maybe fortunate given the genetics, Lajos von Lázár’s parentage isn’t quite what it appears. We soon learn that he is the product of an illicit liaison between Maria, the lady of the manor, and one of the grooms. Lázár gradually reveals itself to be a book about the way the fortunes of a single family are entwined with the historic upheaval of the 20th century. The family seat, where the novel opens, stands close to the town of Pécs, on the southern border of present-day Hungary. On the chilly January day when Lajos draws his first breath, his homeland is still part of the Habsburg empire – the union of Austria and Hungary that also included the Balkan states and parts of northern Italy. As the story develops, enormous changes break up the empire and turn Hungary first into a fascist autocracy and then a satellite state of the Soviet Union. As the privileged former elite, the Lázárs will become a special target for the class warriors of Soviet Hungary. Successive generations of the Lázár family live through all this turmoil over the course of the book, up to the moment of the failed Hungarian uprising in 1956.