I’m afraid this book passed me by. I can be a trifle naive at times: if a book is called a novel, I tend to treat it as one, rather than the series of vignettes that ‘Garden, Ashes’ instead comprised of. I also did this with Dubliners: thinking the chapters were more driven by plot rather than being instead linked by a mood or more abstract notion. Consequently, I think I missed a lot of the good of Garden, Ashes - a lot of reviews wax lyrical about how it skilfully portrays life during the holocaust through the eyes of the young boy, using his feelings and encounters to indirectly illuminate the sufferings of a people but I found it disjointed and hard to follow. The holocaust itself (the backdrop of the novel and the reason for the father’s ‘disappearance’) is also never directly spoken of, yet permeates each chapter through the way events and objects are described or play out. I guess I was expecting it all to be a lot more obvious/ of a story - sequential, plot-driven, more up front. Instead it was alluded to, suggestive and peripheral.

Unfortunately I didn’t have the wherewithal to access the merits of ‘Garden, Ashes’. It left me frustrated and sadly not having enjoyed it - not because it wasn’t good but because I didn’t get it. It might be one I give another try at some point, I have his others novels to have a go at too; hopefully I shall sufficiently prepare myself to work a bit harder as a reader when I do! 2/5 ( )

This novel is, probably, somewhat autobiographical. Andi, the main character, is a child describing life with and then without his father in the 1930s into the 40s. At least part of the book takes place in (or near?) Hungary. His father is Jewish in 1930s Eastern Europe, an alcoholic and dreamer, and often disappears for months on end. The family of four moves often, and his father has a reputation among family and neighbors. Until finally he does not return. The family is hungry, and Andi has awful dreams.

I did not much enjoy this book--it was a slog--for a variety of reasons, but I don't know if it is the story or the translation I found difficult. It is describes as lyric and poetic, but I found the language stodgy and stiff, and overly descriptive. The entire story is told by older Andi looking back, so there is no mention of war or concentration camps, or Jews being deported--it very much reads as from a child's perspective. But. BUT. The language is not a child's. It is nearly all past tense, and so much is passive voice. So many of the words chosen (again--this is the translation--are odd). Fiacre for hackney. Demiurgial. Neurasthenic. Czardases, barcarolles. A whole lot of religious musings. References to older works--Neues Tageblatt; Last Abencerage; children's stories that may or may not be real.

Really this whole book feels like a specific writing for people who get it. Maybe that includes all of Hungary, and Serbia, and all of the Balkans. But I found most of it confusing and stodgy. ( )

Many readers love this book, and it's worth knowing that I'm generally bored by holocaust art, and even worse, that I roll my eyes at the very idea. That's unfair to Kis, whose book is not at all another dull heart-string puller, but I can't help it. I'm just tired of attempts to capture, in art, that singular horror. I miss something, then, because this is interesting attempt.

Leaving aside that whole question, though, Garden, Ashes is the kind of first novel that gets me very excited to read more by the same author. There's no unity here at all: some realistic depictions of a father figure, some surreal weirdness, some lavish (I mean that as a criticism) descriptive prose.

The early chapters, and the last chapter, are glorious, and I'll be re-reading them in the future. But the first-novel feeling reaches its height after the first hundred pages, when Kis decides, for no particularly good reason (I know, I know, it's because of the holocaust) to make the father the focus of the book, and then the father disappears. The following chapter is a fine short piece with little connection to the preceding pages. And then it all goes downhill. Other reviewers have noted that without the father the whole thing heads off the rails. Sad but true. I would put the decline even earlier: after the first "father" chapter, the book probably could have ended, but for the return to the narrator's fear of death in the final chapter.

( )

E' questa la storia di una famiglia vista attraverso gli occhi e le parole di un ragazzo, con in primo piano, prepotente, la figura del padre, allucinato predicatore. Alcolizzato e fanfarone, egli resta affascinante e al centro dell’attenzione del figlio, nonostante le sue sempre più prolungate assenze e la sua definitiva scomparsa. Con i racconti Pene giovanili ed il romanzo La clessidra questo testo costituisce una trilogia centrata sulla figura del padre.

Kis's Wandering Jew ambles around the borders of structure, reigned in by prose. An aspect is examined, then an aspect of that is examined, then the camera zooms out and something larger is examined, but more closely. The effect is something remarkably like the intersection of childhood memory and imagination.

The real star here is the prose. This prose. My God. If I find any patience today, I'll type out the pages dealing with the government surveillance of the prophetic father. ( )