Rebels [Paperback]

In their final year of high school four boys - Abel, Tibor, Bela and Ernö - form a gang. It is May of 1918, the month of their graduation. Their nation (the Hungarian half of the Dual Monarchy) has plans for them - they will be conscripted, given only cursory training, and thrown into the battle-lines of one of the war's lethal fronts as hapless cannon fodder. They may be facing death in the near future. Another distasteful possible future presents itself to them in the person of Lajos, Tibor's older brother who participates in the gang as a senior observer and counselor; he has returned from the Isonzo battleground missing an arm. He is angry, he fears the future, he pities himself, and he conspicuously refuses to "convert" to full adult life. He is an able co-conspirator in the gang's activities, the purpose of which is to wage their own war against adult society, which they fear and despise. They hate authority in each of its incarnations, understanding that its purpose is to either intimidate them (the patriarchal fathers) or plead with them (the pathetic mothers and aunts). They sense that the adult world is withholding secrets and privileges from them but also suspect that when uncovered and experienced, these secrets and privileges will prove to be utterly banal. Parents and teachers are special objects of their wrath and disenchantment. The members of the gang steal, lie, smoke, drink and engage in elaborate hoaxes upon selected adult townsmen. They have even rented quarters in a shabby inn on the outskirts of the city as a hide-out and storage bin for their loot. Much of their stolen money is spent on fanciful objects which are never used or displayed - indeed, the wastefulness of their acquisitions is a conscious element of the gang's overarching principle, which is that each act of their war justifies itself because of the grandeur of their purpose and the unworthiness of their enemies. Yet they remain tentative and uncertain if their risky "games" are truly meaningful or merely a desperate attempt to hang on to the comforts of childhood which have already vanished.

Recently they have formed a strange alliance with an adult whose life and manners, like their "games", seem to gainsay the solid middle-class virtues which they flee and mock. This is the "strolling player" and stage-director Amadé Volpay. He is a large, perfume-scented, epicene creature who enjoys being the center of their attentions when he tells the boys tales of his adventures or when he comments dryly on their new way of life, analyzing without judging; he is not above accepting handouts and gifts from them. The actor also has an open (yet secretive in its aims) connection with the town's pawnbroker, Havas, who, obscenely fat and coarse in his habits while delicate and respectful in his language, both repels and fascinates the boys. As petty thieves they also have recourse to his services, establishing an asymmetrical bond which may prove to be one of bondage.

Within the gang forces are also not equal. With the exception noted presently, the members of the gang may not even be fond of each other in the way that more conventional friends are, but they are still determined to work and live together in their common enterprise of deceit as a form of ultimate self-honesty, signaling to themselves the authenticity of their rebellion. Abel is infatuated with Tibor, who is handsome, polite, generous and athletic; in Abel's mind he is an idealized love object, a feeling which both pleases and frightens him. Tibor is also accepted as their natural leader by Bela, the weakest and most malleable of the four, and by Ernö. It is Ernö who is the most enigmatic, and his true sentiments toward his companions remain opaque. He is a scion of the working class, the son of a cobbler. But, due to his intelligence and independence of spirit, he has been accepted by the other members of the gang (all middle-class) after a life of being patronized by their parents. His father, Mr. Zakarka, also fascinates and sometimes frightens the boys. Zakarka is a small, malformed man who speaks in prophetic Biblical idioms and tones about the coming "settling of accounts" between the haves and have-nots in Hungarian society. He is also proud of the fact that during his days as a soldier his aristocratic officers granted him the privilege of hanging three Czech officers whom they deemed treacherous; he feels that this has "cleansed" his soul, and he intimates that more cleansing of soul and society through murder is just around the corner. His relations with his son's friends and with his social superiors crystallize the class and ethnic divisions which permeated Hungarian society at the time. (On the latter point it is very likely that Marai, whose full name was Sándor Károly Henrik Grosschmied de Mára, and who originally wavered between writing in German or Hungarian, was deeply and personally aware of the unpredictable, and often unsavory, consequences of "strong ethnic claims".) Zakarka's character and mental world are reminiscent of Dostoyevsky's dark and obsessional creations.

Family life within the social circle of Abel and Tibor (whose fathers are, respectively, a physician and a career military officer, both absent at the front) is dispiriting, a natural medium for breeding contempt and discontent. The portrait of Tibor's and Lajos's mother, who feigns illness in order to establish control over her disintegrating family, is especially sharp and demoralizing. Abel's aunt is treated more sympathetically, but her horizons are as narrow as those of the colonel's wife and her situation equally futile. And the whole society of the Austro-Hungarian empire in its fourth and final year of war seems to be sinking into a terminal state of indifference and fatalism, perhaps more apparent to the adolescents than to their elders, who are still blithely willing to send their children off to the pointless war. Joseph Roth's "The Radetzky March" can be seen as an elegiac farewell to the twilight years of the Empire that arrived at "the beginning of the end" in 1914, a backward look tinged with melancholy and fond nostalgia. "The Rebels" looks at the same world four years later, just prior to its final collapse, as the harbinger of an unpromising future in which melancholy will turn into rage and nostalgia itself will become venomous.

Events move toward a crisis that will coincide with their graduation ceremonies and which may unmask them all before the adults. Each of them now longs to end the gang and hopes that the crisis, whatever shape it takes, will liberate them from their mental and emotional burdens - they all feel that "something has to break". One of the gang is a double-dealer, having his own private arrangements with the adult world and betraying their secrets to Volpay and Havas. I won't disclose the identity of the "traitor" or the nature of the group's final crisis here. Suffice it to say it is both surprising and extremely sad, and the book closes on a note which brings to mind the perfect combination of calm objectivity and emotional dismay that Chekhov evoked so well.

The theme of rebellious youth is an old one that has often been treated in literature, on the stage, and in films (of more recent efforts, the English movie "If" and the American movie "Rebel Without a Cause" come immediately to mind, especially in their depiction of the intensity of relationships among adolescent rebels). Marai's handling of the theme avoids the pitfalls of the trite and is exemplary in its sophistication. The translation by George Szirtes reads very well, and one assumes that it reflects Marai's style, which establishes the adolescent mind's inner convolutions in plain language that is used to build complex conditional sentences. The unnamed small city where it takes place seems to be Marai's hometown of Kassa (now Kosice). Marai himself graduated from gymnasium in 1918, so the temper of the times which he depicts so vividly here is based on personal experience. He has created a social and temporal portrait in which the most trivial details of the town's appearance and life are naturally saturated with meaning for its youth, while at one and the same time the place seems to be spiritually empty and devoid of intelligent purpose. This is an excellent novel that serves the reader well as an introduction to a long and accomplished literary career. It is the third of Marai's novels (along with a memoir) that have recently been published in English translations as an ongoing project of "rediscovery" of a very talented writer (noting that, although he spent much of his life outside his homeland, including his last forty years in exile, his reputation has always been high in Hungary). The Knopf edition is compact and handsome in its paper, binding and typography.

This is the third Marai novel translated into English, and like his previous two (Embers and Conversations at Bolzano) he has a knack for bringing to life an historical and social context (a country town in Hungary, late in the first world war). But for my tastes this novel was not as satisfying as its two translated predecessors. Yes, the subject matter is different (the difficult and dangerous transition from adolescence to adulthood), but some of the central characters lack a certain clarity and depth. The novel's power lies, however, in the skill in which the apparently peripheral characters are delineated (and here I mean the Cobbler, who seems to step into the story from a nineteenth-century Russian novel or short-story, and Tibor's mother), characterisations that are rich but also leave one wanting to know more. For me they save the novel. The last fifty pages or so are worth the wait. I look forward to the next translation.

I was lucky enough to read Sándor Márai's The Rebels while traveling through Budapest, Bratislava, and Prague. This was part of my standing rule of reading a novel from the country you are visiting while traveling. In paid off well with Stevenson in the UK and Strindberg in Sweden. It did not serve me well with Bowles in Morocco. In the case of Márai it was a perfect fit. Having had my feet on the ground, mangling the Hungarian language in my worst attempts at communicate with the locals, I experienced the feeling of Budapest for myself.

There is a mellowness and peace to Hungarians these days. It may be due to the fact that until recently, Hungary was constantly being conquered by one empire or military power after another. The Turks, Habsburgs, Nazis, and Stalinists all took their turn. For a brief period, leading up to and into World War I, Hungary merged with Austria, forming the second largest country in Europe. However, the defeat of the central powers in World War I, including Austria-Hungary, lead to 70 years of dark days for the country. It is at that stumbling point -- Austria-Hungary's entry in the war -- that Márai sets the book, having experienced first hand the embarrassing (for Hungarians) dissolution of the dual monarchy and its multi-ethnic society.

I state all this not to drone on about trivia, but to point out the context of The Rebels and the historical reality of what Márai experienced at the time of the writing the novel. For some reason, Americans don't seem to `get' The Rebels. I've seen reviews where readers say the book is too foreign to enjoy, have labeled Márai as anti-Semitic and homophobic, and even more absurd, state that they cannot relate to the characters because they are all adolescent males. Take that Holden Caulfield. These sad misperceptions of The Rebels cause these readers to miss out on what is a superb novel. Dated, perhaps. Esoteric to western culture? No more than any Russian novel. Anti-everything-under-the-sun? Considering that Márai pined for multi-ethnic and multi-cultural Hungary in his Memoir of Hungary, was highly critical of the Nazis (a dangerous stance under the Arrow Cross Government), and soundly against the subsequent puppet-communist regime installed by Stalin, it is very doubtful the book has a prejudice against anything except oppression and senseless death.

As the title suggests, the focus of the book is rebellion. In this case, four childhood friends who, fearing their subsequent banishment to the front lines of World War I, engage in a very adolescent form of rebellion, starting with lying, but eventually moving on to mind games, and out-and-out theft. The friends -- Ábel, Tibor, Ernò, and Béla -- are snapshots of Hungarian youth at that time. The first a wealthy (but disassociated) son of a doctor, the second an almost too beautiful and unrugged son of a colonel, the third a lower class son of a disfigured cobbler, the fourth an irresponsible son of a shopkeeper. At the start of the book, all four are lost -- at least in the sense that the looming spectre of death in the trenches has them incapable of seeing any future. This is represented most notably by Tibor's brother who returned from the front minus an arm and a good chunk of his sanity. The disorderly appearance of Ábel's room, after a night of drinking and card playing, is a perfect metaphor for the state of mental disarray they are experiencing. In this mess, Ábel discovers by chance that one of the four has cheated at cards. Rather than be infuriated by the trickery, it spurs Ábel (and eventually the others) to attempt more daring forms of lying, deceit, and thievery. They become, in essence, a gang. The misguided rebellion, as one would expect, leads to their downfall, most notably at the hands of the pawnbroker Havas and a mysterious accomplice, who is not revealed until later in the book. Ultimately, this downfall becomes a tale of revenge, spurned on by class conflict, homophobic resentment, and a disconnect with authority (most notably represented by the fathers of the tale).

Márai is one of those exceptional writers who was able to make his characters live and breathe. A great example of this is the actor, Amadé, who is rendered so wonderfully complete in his idiosyncrasies, expressions, and almost bipolar flips in emotion:

"It was as if his girth were no more than some kind of misapprehension that existed between him and the world at large, and he never ceased talking about it. He spoke eloquently and at length to both intimates and strangers in the effort to persuade them that he was not fat. He produced precise measurements and medical tables showing average proportions to prove he was as slender as a flamingo and that his figure was in all respects the manly ideal, his belly swelling as he did so because, in his passion, he forgot to hold it in."

When not giving the characters the well-roundedness that is signature to the book or focusing on their exploits, Márai paints dark portraits of the town, reminding the reader that in spite of the self-centered acts of the four teenagers, there is the darker world of World War I surrounding them. This description of corpses from the war nails the looming threat and the stark reality of the novel's setting perfectly:

"All objects--houses, public squares, whole towns--puff themselves up with spring moonlight, swelling and bloating like corpses in the river. The river dragged such corpses through town at a run. The corpses swam naked and traveled great distances... they floated rapidly down on the spring flood heading towards their ultimate terminus, the sea. The dead were fast swimmers."

In the end, it is the gang's reluctance to own up to the consequences of their actions, their shucking off of adult responsibility in favor of blind rebellion, that proves to be their downfall. They are still children, playacting at rebellion. Márai parodies this superbly when Amadé brings the gang to a theater, dressing them up as characters in a bad stage play. The gang is happy to keep up their exploits when the going is easy, but they grow increasingly panicky and paranoid as their schemes begin to unravel. When the consequences are laid out so clearly at the end of the novel, Márai lets no one off easy.

Perhaps that is because Márai knew where all this rebellion and senseless violence would lead. It never served Hungary well in real life, only resulting in the death of too many citizens for senseless reasons. And in the world of The Rebels, every action has a consequence that ultimately wrenches the gang into adulthood with all its ugly realities.

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