The Adventures of Sindbad by Gyula Krúdy (Szindbád Három Könyve, 1944) translated from the Hungarian by George Szirtes (1998) NYRB Classics (2011)
I knew nothing about Gyula Krúdy or about this book before picking it up — what does this Hungarian have to do with the more famous Persian sailor? — but with NYRB Classics one doesn’t have to worry too much about such things. Just pick up a book and begin. And when I opened up The Adventures of Sindbad I was in for many pleasant surprises.
Krúdy was a prolific writer who lived from 1878 to 1933, and he wrote many stories focused on the young (or old — or dead — or mistletoed) Sindbad, from 1911 to 1917. Here we have them collected in one volume. In his introduction, translator George Szirtes tells readers what’s to come, though I don’t think we can entirely understand until we read the stories. They are so unique, in Hungary there is a term: “Krúdyesque.” I think a good example, then, is to refer to the other “-esque” author from roughly the same period: Can you imagine trying to explain — beyond simple plot — a Kafka story to someone who hadn’t experienced the Kafkaesque first-hand? Me either. So here we have the Krúdyesque, which Szirtes aptly describes as “an experience comprised of the nostalgic, the fantastic and the ironic.”
We first meet Sindbad in “Youth,” a rather conventional story that in no way foreshadows the strangeness that is to come, though it does touch upon central themes, particularly love and lust. The story begins by taking us to “a damp and moonlit night” when an old man is “watching the autumn mist form figures of chimney-sweeps on the rooftops.” His mind is taken to an old monastery where, as a child, he used to see a painting of an intimidating and authoritative Prince Lubomirski. The red-bearded, shaggy-haired Prince has been dead for two centuries, but still “[t]he young ladies of Podolin who came to the monks for absolution would wreathe his picture with flowers fresh from the meadow, and women, who a couple of centuries before would have given birth to red-bearded, shaggy-haired children, prayed before the prince’s image precisely as they did before pictures of the saints.”
This opening — the introduction of an old man looking back to a painting of someone then two-centuries’ dead, as well as the adoration of the image — foreshadows the idea that the boundaries of time do not always hold up. Sure, two centuries ago the Prince would remove his gloves in the presence of ladies and cannot do so now, but that isn’t stopping their current adoration.
We soon learn that the old man in “Youth” is Sindbad, who was a student at the monastery. Because “in those days” it was common for romantic souls to choose their own name, Sindbad indeed named himself after the sailor in The Thousand and One Nights. In many ways, this collection of short stories is just as varied in time and form as The Thousand and One Nights, and just as populated with a type of mystical eroticism. And, perhaps in homage to the tales, Krúdy wastes no time giving us a conclusion that keeps us wondering “How did all this happen?”: “It was in this office one Sunday, while wearing his red surplice, that [Sindbad] succeeded in seducing Anna Kacksó, who had come to Mass along with a few friends of hers.”
But this is a false start (one of many). As the story moves from “How did all this happen?,” we meet Anna’s two sisters and the story focuses on Róza, the youngest, the real love interest. Róza teases Sindbad as they study together. Sindbad deals with this by playing with a fellow classmate he often picks on, Pope Gregory (his chosen name), who has a hunchback. Róza is mean and withholds affection. Sindbad deals with this by going swimming with Pope Gregory. Krúdy has the ability here to make the reader’s mind become quiet.
Naturally, the boys bathed in the deep still water, holding on to the iron staples in the timber, dangling their legs in the bottomless pool. The little hunchback felt absolutely safe in the company of the brave and admirable Sindbad. Suddenly he gave a triumphant cry, ‘Hey, I can feel the river bed here!’ He extended his thin legs. His inky fingers let go of the metal bar and the water silently closed over him. For a brief second Sindbad could still see the curious hump on his back under the surface of the river, then the water, the shore and the tall limes nearby grew unaccountably quiet as if the monastery had touched them with a magic wand and they had died on the spot, as in The Thousand and One Nights.
Sindbad is terrified. He searches for Pope Gregory, imagining that the Prince is already coming out of his gilt frame, knowing he will be blamed for the drowning. The story ends (it’s a short story, and the first of many, so I don’t feel terrible giving all of this away) with Sindbad in bed, and Róza leans over and whispers into his ear: “You are a brave boy. And I will love you for ever now.”
It’s a dark story. The death of a foolishly trusting young boy is used to move the action between a young man and a young woman. I immediately turned to the next one.
As I mentioned above, “Youth” is a bit more conventional than the rest, and because of this is kind of an outlier. In some stories, he is dreaming. In one he is a sprig of mistletoe. But painful love remains because Sindbad is always “a tireless voyager, a friend to women, a knight errant for those in sleepy provincial towns; he was the last worldly thought of virgins about to enter convents and the hope of the ageing.” In fact, not even death (Sindbad is dead in many of the stories but just as mobile and influential as Sindbad imagined the Prince to be) can stop him; indeed, that last line I quote comes from a passage where Sindbad is wandering out of the graveyard periodically for affairs before returning, listening to the rain on the gravestones for maybe a year, and then lying in the crypt to talk to his dead relatives around him.
That image — returning to a graveyard after an affair, sitting pensively in the rain, then communicating with the dead, all the while waiting for the next affair to start — encapsulates a lot of the feelings in the book. There’s a lot of wandering through space and time, and melancholic (but somehow pleasant) love prevails, so well, in fact, that even the grave is nothing terrible — a moment to yearn, thus making the heart grow even more. Of course, all of that is still tinged with shadow and is quite disturbing if you think about it. It is beautifully done here, in the same way, say, a dusty wedding dress from the 1850s — that someone died in — is beautiful.
One aspect of the book that I cannot comment on other than to pass along what I read is the fact that these stories were written at the end of the Hapsburg Empire. Hungary would no longer be the Hungary of these tales, and both the introduction and the book’s blurb speak about “the uncanny evocation of the Hapsburg Empire.” As I said, I cannot comment on this because I know so little about this time period at that part of the world. What I experienced while reading the book, however, was just that nostalgia, fantasy, and irony — the Krúdyesque, and I could see connections with the ending of an epoch — autumn or early winter is a great time to read this fantastic book.
Ah, very nice to see this review Trevor: I spotted this on the NYRB site just on Monday, and popped it straight on the wishlist. Sounds like my instinct was right.
You’ve perfectly captured a “feeling” that I can understand and relate to the book: it makes me even more keen to read it. The Hapsburg angle is another one that makes this very attractive – I’d expect Max to be intrigued as well.
Indeed, as I wrote my review I thought of you and Max, leroy. I recommend taking it off your wishlist and putting it into your hands as soon as possible. I’d be very interested in any insights into the Hapsburg connections.
Noted, Trevor. I’m trying to enforce a semi-embargo on new books and work through the TBR pile, but I guess I’m allowed the odd wild card! Sounds like this will be worth bending the rules for.
Leroy clearly knows me too well.
I’m familiar with Krudy, and have even heard the term Krudyesque before, but I’ve not yet read any. Starting with a Szirtes translation would be perfect.
Some Joseph Roth has an air of nostalgia, melancholy, a slightly (but easily overstated) mythic quality. The end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire I think underpins a great deal of excellent fiction, and is I think hard for us to understand. It was the end of a world, but the people were left behind. How must that feel?
I guess writers like Krudy and Joseph Roth answer that question.
You’ve captured the mood of it beautifully, and I suspect that’s a tricky thing to do. What an expensive month this is proving for me. Still, I need to start somewhere with Krudy and this does sound like that somewhere.
So happy to see this review of Krudy. He is truly one of the most undeservedly underrated Central/Eastern European writers of the 19th and 20th centuries. I think the best place to go to get a sense of how his writing fits into a certain place and time period is John Lukacs’ introduction to Krudy’s novel Sunflower, also published by NYRB. It looks like you can access the entire intro through Google books.
Not only is Sunflower a fantastic, fantastic novel that carries many of the hallucinatory, autumnal qualities that this review finely touches on, it is worth picking up to better understand how Krudy captures what was a distinctly Budapestian atmosphere at the turn of the century. I can’t remember how deeply and explicitly into the Habsburg influence the intro essay delves, but it does thoroughly explore how the city was, during the time of Krudy’s writing, undergoing a cultural flourishing that witnessed a strong public emergence of expanding middle and upper classes that simultaneously exposed the disparities between these and lower classes more than ever. This makes Krudy’s writing, I think, all the more powerful, for it seems that he captures so well the escapisms, fantasies and reveries of those lower classes “stuck” during this time of much cultural, social and historical flux.
I would also highly recommend his novel Ladies’ Day, which I think is his best, but can only be found in English through a few European presses.
So glad to see this review, because somehow I had not heard that NYRB Classics put out more Krúdy—I read Sunflower a couple years back and fell completely in love with the (apparently) Krúdyeque triptych of nostalgia, fantasy, and irony (a perfect description). This immediately broke a book-buying embargo of my own, I feel so strongly about Krúdy.
The end-of-a-Hapburg-era thing is also one of my favorite elements of it all, actually, and as I’m embarking on a bit of a Great War–related project, I realize this actually “fits in” with my previous reading plans.
I would strongly recommend Sunflower to you if you enjoyed this.
I have been eyeing Sunflower, so it’s only a matter of time.
I’m thrilled to see that people find this appealing or have read it and agree with me. This is a remarkable book, a nice surprise for the end of the year for me.