Quiet, Shattering, Perfect
Skylark by Dezso Kosztolányi, translated from the Hungarian by Richard Aczel, with an introduction by Péter EsterházyNew York Study Books, 224 pp., $15.00 (paper)
This short, nonpareil novel seems to encapsulate all the world's pain in a soap lather. Its surface is as smooth as a fable, its setting and characters are unremarkable, its accent is blithe, and its effect is shattering.
Any story about people is implicitly anxious with fate: How has it come about that this thing rather than that thing has happened to this actually rather than that person? Much fiction employs one sort of crude causation or another to strongarm events into a clumsily trumped-up action asserting that A has led inexorably to Z, or, at the other pole, drops in front of us a heap of whimsical incident and demands that we marvel at the inscrutability of life's progress—which in fact is something we can do perfectly well on our own.
And as we're well
