Aunts and Uncles

Michael Hofmann

  • A Feast in the Garden by George Konrad, translated by Imre Goldstein
    Faber, 394 pp, £14.99, October 1992, ISBN 0 571 16623 7
  • Wartime Lies by Louis Begley
    Picador, 198 pp, £5.99, August 1992, ISBN 0 330 32099 8
  • Brothers by Carmelo Samona, translated by Linda Lappin
    Carcanet, 131 pp, £13.95, August 1992, ISBN 0 85635 940 8
  • Rolling by Thomas Healy
    Polygon, 161 pp, £7.95, July 1992, ISBN 0 7486 6121 2

After a lost war, Hofmannsthal said, one should write comedies, and in the Twenties, within his limitations and against his genius, he did just that. I wonder what he would prescribe for the countries of Eastern Europe – many of them former Habsburg territories – after what is infinitely worse than a lost war: regional entropy; systemic collapse; an abrupt close brackets on an experiment that failed; a largely bloodless and painfully incomplete reversion to the status quo ante of forty, fifty, even ninety years ago; future generations exposed to the deleterious half-lives of political, industrial and human debris; the discrediting of one set of political ideas in favour of another, older, just as discredited and probably far more violent – the belief in race and nation. Riddle? Farce? Silence?

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