There was no good reason for me to visit the bookshop last Friday, but I couldn’t very well walk by Crawford Doyle without looking in the window — and what did I see there but the wonderfully titled, completely unknown-to-me Transylvanian Trilogy. A thickish Everyman edition, and Volume I to boot! A long and lovely read was promised. I stepped inside and, sampling a few pages, found that I liked them very much. I left the shop without the second book, which contains Volumes II and III, because I didn’t want to be dragging it around at the Museum, my next stop. But I’ll be ready for it by next week, no matter how indulgently I luxuriate in the book that I did buy.

Opening in the autumn of 1904, They Were Counted (Volume I) centers on the Hungarian aristocracy, much of it Protestant, that held the fields and forests that stretch within the horseshoe of the Carpathian Mountains. Today, this territory lies within Romania, thanks to the Treaty of Trianon, one of the many bad arrangements made after World War I. But being in Hungary meant that it was, ultimately, under Austrian control, “dual monarchy” notwithstanding. Míklos Bánffy, scion of an ancient landed family quite as grand as the ones that people his fiction, wrote the book after the war, when the patriotism of his class no longer made any sense; and by the time he died, impoverished, in 1950, its wealth had been stripped away entirely. Midway through They Were Counted, however, I have yet to sniff a sense of loss. It would appear that the downfall of his way of life simply made Bánffy a very clear writer.

The novel was published, in Hungarian, in 1934. It did not appear in English until 1999. I am not sure that I’d have been drawn to it but for two recent influences: a re-reading of The Leopard that has not yet lost its spell, and Caleb Crain’s Necessary Errors. The newer novel filled me with a passion to be lost in Central Europe, where the sea is very far away and the territorial frontiers have shifted significantly in recent centuries. Crain’s Prague and Bánffy’s Kolozsvar (now Cluj) have little in common, but they stand at roughly equal distance from the world outside my window, and for similar reasons their histories are wrapped in a tissue of secrecy. And both books are studded with the disheartening discoveries that smart young people can’t help making.

They Were Counted is one of the most opulent books that I have ever opened. The writing is measured and tonic, and not at all showy, but almost everything that it holds up to the light is rich, in the way that everything in the Tale of Genji is rich. A good deal of the opulence is social, of course; there are grand houses and elaborate hunts. At a Carnival ball, “it was only young girls who did not wear imposing tiaras.” But much of the beauty is natural, as in this highly scenic description of a waterfall that Balint Abady, the central figure, visits as part of a tour of his forest properties.

Though the waterfall still could not be seen, they were so close that at every step they were drenched by the spray, while the roar of the falling water echoed round them like thunder. Then, clinging to their long fir-bows and sliding, slipping through the snowdrfifts, they rounded one more giant boulder and there it was, right in front of them, a huge arc of water springing clear from the rocks a hundred feet above.

Nothing interrupted the fall off the water: it was like a pillar of liquid bluish-green metal in front of the glistening black of the wet rock cliffsides, and from this dark mass rose white foam-crests or spray, which in turn were transformed into large droplets white as pearls that fell into the boiling swirling mass of water in the basin at the foot of the great fall. Sometimes a thread of water would break away from the central mass and seemed to hang quivering in the air until it too dissolved and merged with the rest. Immediately others would take its place springing out freely over the chasm below, endlessly repeated, endlessly varied, a constant picture of which the details were never the same from one moment to another. Underground springs fed the basin at the foot of the fall and even when in the air it was degrees below zero steam would mingle with the spray to form icicles which hung from every bow and every overhanging rock, so that the fall itself was framed by pillars of ice.

The waterfall’s “surging energy and apparent will to live” reminds Balint of a married woman who has come to fascinate him. He has known her all his life, and he believes that he doesn’t love her, but she haunts his thoughts. Hypnotized by an open fire at one of his forest-camps, Balint comes to a conclusion about her that invites comparisons with famous novels about star-crossed love.

Thinking now once more of Adrienne, he felt that at last he knew what she was really like, and that she, like the fire, was driven by some fatal force of which she herself could barely be aware but which, powerful and uncontrollable, must, in the end, prove fatal.

Why it should be a pleasure to read such lines is one of the great perversities of fiction.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 3rd, 2013 at 3:35 pm.