Celestial Harmonies

There’s a special kind of despair that occurs when you’re on the fourth page of an 844 page tome and you realise that the author has elected not to use quotation marks.  Luckily, it seems that Peter Esterházy is just messing.  The quotation marks come back at some point.  I forget when.  To be honest, I utterly lost interest long before the quotation marks returned.  Celestial Harmonies tells the story of the Esterházy family, a sickeningly famous Hungarian tribe of counts who lost their fortune during the reign of communism. 

My main issue with the book is the same thing that I found with Oscar and Lucinda.  It’s the history of a family I know nothing about, but it’s worse.  Because the Esterházys are so famous in his native Hungary, Esterházy assumes we know about his family.  It’d be like reading a book, written by Prince William, about our royal family.  One presumes he wouldn’t go to the trouble of explaining just who his grandmother is.  It made the whole thing so difficult to read.  It also removes a lot of the foreshadowing that I’m sure is intended to be in the book.  Don’t get me wrong, there are so many other reasons that I didn’t like the book, but none of this crap helped.

Celestial Harmonies is split into two rough halves: Number Sentences from the Lives of the Esterházy Family and, Confessions of an Esterházy Family.  I hated the first section.  It’s almost four hundred pages of short vignettes that contradict each other and probably relate to something I’m supposed to know about but don’t.  Esterházy tells about 60 stories of his father’s death and his parents’ first meeting each.  I doubt very much whether any of these are true but there’s the implication that this kind of thing did happen in his family.  It’s mostly frustrating as the stories all contradict one another and they don’t get us anywhere.  We learn nothing that is true from the whole 400 page ordeal.  And this made willing myself to commit to the next 400 was difficult to say the least.

I was also super annoyed by the fact that Esterházy doesn’t seem to go too far into what it’s like to grow up with his name.  It’d be like one of the younger Kardashians saying that their surname is only good for the anecdotes that it has brought with it.  It’s just not true.  Growing up as part of a famous family affects people.  If I’m honest, Esterházy might have gone into this in far more detail than I’m giving him credit for.  By the time he, as a character, actually rocked up I was well into speed reading the thing just to get to the bloody end.

In all, I am disappointed with this book.  I loved history growing up and I really hoped that it would be a chance to get to know more about Hungary in a way that doesn’t involve a World War… or goulash.  Instead, the whole thing felt a bit smug.  In Celestial Harmonies, Esterházy is at times so deliberately self-deprecating that it feels fake.  It’s a bit like that time David Cameron said he ate a pasty at a train station or pretends to support Aston Villa (or West Ham); he’s smug not only because of the generations of entitlement but also because he’s nailed being one of the commoners.  He can relate to us, shouldn’t we be thankful, shouldn’t we be in awe of the Esterházys’ illustrious past.

I’ve now moved on to greener pastures, Marya: A Life  by Joyce Carole Oates.