Gyula Krudy at Hungarian Literature Online

Another post while I'm away...

"A gentleman does not kick a woman."
"Your lordship is right as far as that goes," said Kazmer Rezeda. "If the occasion arises, strangling is far more appropriate."

Hungarian Literature Online had a recent excerpt from next year's release of Gyula Krúdy's 1931 novel The Knight of the Cordon Bleu. The link takes you to Chapter 14 of the upcoming translation.

There are several more excerpts from some of Krúdy's other books at the site. First, though, is a brief look at his life which undermines his common title of the Hungarian Proust, at least when comparing the two writers' artistic approaches.

Additional posts and excerpts:

Life is a Dream

The short story "The Voice from the Past"

The Ancient Goddess in Krúdy’s Sunflower

About The Charmed Life of Kázmér Rezeda

Dezső Kosztolányi's poem "For Gyula Krúdy"

Szindbád (1971 movie)

Szindbád movie trailer



Links:
The IMDb.com page for Szindbád
My notes on The Adventures of Sindbad by Gyula Krúdy, the source for the movie (and recommended if you're unfamiliar with Krúdy's work).

How do you adapt Krúdy’s surreal, atmospheric work to the screen? The easy answer is very carefully. The more involved answer would be something like director Zoltán Huszárik’s movie. Huszárik takes an unconventional approach, befitting such an unconventional character. While much of Krúdy’s stories rely on descriptions and atmosphere, Huszárik relies on cinematic equivalents with gorgeous scenes and visual impressions.

Warning—there are many spoilers ahead, but I think they would actually help the first-time viewer. The movie opens with a montage of close-up shots, each devoid of meaning but they will connect with later scenes in the movie. Finally we are introduced to Sindbad (I’ll use the Anglicized spelling), piled into a horse-drawn carriage, the unaccompanied horse told to take him home. It turns out Sindbad is dead or dying and the viewer is treated to flashbacks of his life and conquests. Some scenes are symbolic, such as a young Sindbad participating in a spring dance with two young women (the end of the movie has a much older Sindbad with a winter fairy), although the bulk of the movie centers on Sindbad’s many loves. Huszárik continually shows close-up shots, as if to emphasize that we don’t always recognize what we see in front of us--the surreal nature of the film at times reinforcing this message. As Sindbad ages in the flashbacks, a malaise sets in as he recognizes the memories are all he has. His sensual pleasure, echoed in the aesthetic beauty of the film, provides him little sustenance. He makes no effort to hide his shortcoming and recognizes what he has lost in his triumphs. And he’s not shy in telling others about it either—in response to a lover telling of her disillusionment with him, Sindbad replies

No reproaches, please, sweetheart. You’ve put on your dark glasses again. Life is a chain of beautiful lies. There is no feeling more touching than love. At our age, when all noble feelings, like piety, devotion, respect, friendship, patriotism are slowly fading from this world, only love is capable of conjuring back the illusion of times long past. We need the tenderness of women more than ever. Because every woman, even the most common is related to the moon, to the other world, to superstition. Only women can improve us men who’ve become brutes. And they should be given the chance to carry out this improvement on men.

So how successful is Huszárik in capturing Krúdy’s creation? Many of the scenes are straight out of the book, faithful in many details. The atmosphere of the book is, for the most part, reflected on the screen. The hardest part to translate has to do with Sindbad being dead for many of his stories. Huszárik acknowledges this in the movie’s premise of Sindbad dying (or already dead) at the start of the movie, intermingling his life and dreams as the movie progresses. A restless feeling permeates Sindbad and the movie, a continual search for something that always eludes him. Probably the most successful feeling Huszárik conveys centers on the feeling of loss--something is missing, even if the characters don’t know what it is. Sindbad talks about his mother and her generation, adding what must have been plenty of then-current political messages :

They were of a different breed as to how we grew up to be. They knew how to live. In those days, you could still live. And they knew how to live well. But these people don’t know it. They don’t even know about the beauty of life. They don’t know what a good meal is, what a delight good rest can be. I don’t like these modern times. They say these are transitory times. But I didn’t ask for any transitory time nor do I remember even wanting this life either. I have never asked for favoritism. I’m not even interested in knowing what there is to be happy about being Hungarian.

The Second Run DVD edition of Szindbád comes with a booklet written by film historian Michael Brooke with information on the movie, Krúdy, and director Huszárik. My only quibble with Brooke’s excellent essay comes in his comments on Krúdy’s Sindbad: “He meets no monsters en route, merely women, a species that he reveres but has never come close to understanding (let alone conquering), an incomprehension that turns even the most potentially fulfilling encounters into something suffused with regretful melancholy.” I’ll agree with the melancholy, but it seemed to me Sindbad understood women very well (most incarnations of him, anyway) even if they did surprise him at times. Brooke also includes some online links to related features and references for anyone wanting further viewing—this edition was made for geeks like me (although some of the links no longer work). On the DVD is a 12-minute feature with director Peter Strickland, providing context in addition to his appreciation of the film.

The following restaurant scene clip in Szindbád has the most talked about imagery in the movie. It provides so much more than just images, though, but the clip does not have subtitles. During the meal, Sindbad continually asks the waiter Vendelin about his wife. No matter how many times Sindbad changes the subject (usually to comment on food), he returns to why Vendelin’s wife left. Eventually the waiter finishes his story—it turns out she left him for Sindbad. Then, as the clip hints at the end, she left Sindbad to drown herself. Huszárik ties Sindbad’s sensual longing for good food and for women together. To Sindbad, each is of a fleeting nature, to be relished and savored while you have them, then moving on to the next meal/woman. Highly recommended.

For more foreign movies, check out Caroline's World Cinema Series 2012 and Richard's monthly Foreign Film Festival round-up.

The Adventures of Sindbad

Biography of Gyula Krúdy

I discovered Trevor at The Mookse and the Gripes has reviewed this and another NYRB Classic I started, so I’ll be sure and link his posts. While there will be some overlap in our reviews I’ll try to focus on additional topics in Krúdy’s work.

Translator George Szirtes provides a helpful introduction to this compilation of stories, informing the reader that “In Hungary, the terms ‘Krúdyesque’ and ‘the world of Krúdy’ have a currency which extends beyond books and conjures an experience comprised of the nostalgic, the fantastic and the ironic.” Szirtes’ description provides a framework to understand the tales but Krúdy’s stories have to be read to appreciate the mystical world he creates. Although ‘mistical’ might be a better term since so much occurs in a misty netherworld, including a healthy amount of dreams and ghosts.

First, the name: we find out in the first story that Sindbad “selected his name from his favourite book of stories, The Thousand and One Nights, for in those days, it was still fairly common for knight errants, poets, actors and passionate scholars to choose names from themselves.” The name proves appropriate—rarely satisfied with his lot, Sindbad wanders often and far. Sindbad, though, is an adventurer of a different sort, his attempted conquests of a carnal nature instead of financial gain. While the original Sindbad never let shipwrecks set him back, so the more recent version won’t let death keep him from his goal—to live on in the memory and dreams of the women he seduces.

Relations between men and women follow a script: men are supposed to try to take a woman’s virtue, using every means at their disposal. The women are supposed to know the men lie and hold out…well, at least hold out longer than they do. In “The Secret Room”, as in other stories, falling in love is the same as imprisonment, longings are ruined by their realization, and familiarity breeds boredom. As explicitly stated in another tale, “what would be the point of dreaming if dreams came true?”

In “Escape from Women”, Sindbad’s appraisal of women proves to be harsh but generous while laying out a game scripted in advance:

‘The strange thing,’ he thought to himself, ‘is that women tend to behave better than one has a right to expect. Poor things, giving their all, their kisses, their dreams and sighs, smuggling my name into their evening prayers—I’d be surprised if the angels didn’t wonder at times what my name was doing among the usual company of aged faters, mothers and tiny children… They were very good indeed, poor creatures. From now on Sindbad will teach the young to cherish women, as they do flowers, as indeed they do so many odd, weak, cheated, robbed, often tortured beings…Is it not touching that for all the times they have been disappointed, the hours they have wept and mourned, nothing continues to engage them so intensely as the serious subject of love. Love is everything to them: the air they breathe, the water they thirst for, the miracle they marvel at. They talk of love as though it were something that had independent existence, something so solid it might be grasped. Though it is true that the subject of fashion runs a close second to love in their thoughts.

‘God bless you then, dear good women—virgins, countesses, women of affairs, half-crazed Jewesses—all who listened with trembling lips, skeptical smiles and with desire and astonishment in your hears when Sindbad favoured you with softly spoken, delicately enunciated lies that filled your heads and souls, that heightened your colour and your mood, and gave you something to think about…For his part, Sindbad would go on to leap from the windows of cursed castles and cry his eyes out for some other woman. At other times, in a complete daze, wholly undiscriminating, he would reach out to pluck one of you, almost anyone—a tea-rose or a roadside thistle—and would have forgotten your name by morning. Forgotten names and voices, voices into which whole lives were poured, your endless self-sacrifice, the dangers into which your passions led you, and the peculiar, precious vows which Sindbad managed to extract from you with the skill of a practised father-confessor—all forgotten. You were all happy to forswear yourselves in the hour of love…Really it hardly mattered that not one of you ever kept her vow.
(Ellipses in original)

[Skip to the end of the story] As the years went by there were messages from far away. Women wanted him to come back: they were bored, they felt nostalgic; they wanted to laugh, cry, cackle, fret and be happy. But Sindbad did not go back because he kept account of the lovers that had succeeded him in their affections. The subsequent pain and bitter disappointment prevented him ever forgiving their unfaithfulness. He was a rogue: in the Middle Ages he would have gone the rounds of the prisons where he would have been shorn, first of his nose, then of his ears. Furthermore, he always believed he was speaking the truth and one can ask no clearer proof of a man’s wickedness. He could never forgive women. He thought he perceived miraculous qualities in them, a combination of the fidelity of the saints with the virtues of the martyrs. And how he would rage when one of them took up with another man though it was he who had done the leaving.

Let us therefore close the file on Sindbad’s not altogether pointless and occasionally amusing existence.

A few comments on Krúdy’s tales, which at times read like nostalgia while at the same time rejecting the past. The living and those in the afterlife both appear melancholy, the line between their worlds of existence blurred or nonexistent. The dead can appear and interact with the living, while at other times they provide the living’s subconscious. Desires held during life carry over into the afterworld. If nothing changes, what is the point of life and death?

Sindbad would often sit down to consider how it was that an entire world, a world that was supposed to have disappeared some time ago, could so resurrect itself before him. It was as if Hungarian village life had remained unchanged over the centuries. The people had changed but they had they had been replaced by others precisely like them. As if birth, death and marriage were all part of some curious joke.

Update: My notes on the 1971 movie Szindbád, directed by Zoltán Huszárik