Tag: Mor Jokai

Book Review: Eyes Like the Sea, by Mór Jókai

(‘You have a rich aunt at Ó Gyalla, and you’ve only got to say a word to her and she’ll get your book printed for you. I suppose you’ve only got to ask her?’

‘I shall not tell my rich aunt a word about it.’

‘Then you’ll get your book printed at Fani Weinmüller’s, I suppose. Now listen, that won’t do at all. I know an author who published his own book and went from village to village, and persuaded every landed proprietor to buy a copy from him. That is a rugged path.’

‘My romance will not be one of those which the author himself has to carry from door to door; it will be one of those for which the publisher pays the author an honorarium.’

She absolutely laughed in my face.

[pp. 25-26 of 1894 edition])

Is Bessy, whose Eyes are Like the Sea, a feminist hero or a flighty ditz? Herein may be discerned the opinion of her delineator:

I could not help laying my hand on hers. What true, what noble sentiments were slumbering in that heart! If only she had some one to awaken them! What an excellent lady might have been made out of this woman, if she had only met with a husband who, in the most ordinary acceptance of the word, had been a good fellow, as is really the case with about nine men out of every ten. Why should she have always managed to draw the unlucky tenth out of the urn of destiny? (p. 353)

Female nobility, then, is a potential, to be unlocked by a man. This system hardly admits of female agency, but at least Bessy is no femme fatale: She is not a bad thing that happens to men but a person to whom bad men happen. (Women acting through men is a common sight in another of Jókai’s works, Midst the Wild Carpathians.)

Of course, it’s all very beautiful and sad:

‘You do not know me. A man might make a she-devil of me, though he built a temple in my name straight off, enshrined me on the altar, and knelt down before me. But he whom I truly loved might make an angel of me. I could be happy anywhere: in a shepherd’s hut, a strolling player’s tent, at a soldier’s bivouac, in a schoolmaster’s clay cabin. I would dream of luxury on my bed of straw.’

And with that, she threw herself at full length on my bare sofa, and clasped her hands above her head. (pp. 37-38)

Book Review, Midst the Wild Carpathians, by Mór Jókai

Upon finishing this intriguing book, I turned back to page one and began reading again, in the hope that the intricacies of its plot might become clearer the second time around. One dimension of this intricacy relates to the complex political situation of seventeenth-century Transylvania, where Ottoman Turks retained some influence despite the country’s nominal independence and where the word “Hungarian” could refer not only to the native ethnic stock but also to emigres from Hungary proper. Another relates to author Mór Jókai’s inexplicit treatment of cause and effect in the storyline, his disinclination to comment on how certain actions proceed from others. At any rate, my second reading was well worth it, as familiarity built on itself, yielding greater comprehension.

One obvious theme of the book is womanly influence over men. A typical sentence reads, “The chair of state was large enough to accommodate them both. It is true that the pretty wife had to sit half upon her husband’s knee, but that certainly did not inconvenience either of them.” (pp. 75-76) Another runs, “The women, like so many Bacchantes, ran in search of weapons, and mounted the ramparts by the side of their husbands, whom the determination of their wives had turned into veritable heroes.” (pp. 174)

However clever and strong the women of this book may be, though, they operate only through men. They are not independent.

Also intriguing to me is the hero of the last part of the book, Denis Banfi, who seems a typical representative of the gentry in the ease with which he shifts from grandiosity to viciousness. “The traces of noble enthusiasm and of unbridled fury are impressed upon his face side by side just as they are in his heart.” (p. 157)

In short, I enjoyed reading it once and more than doubly enjoyed reading it twice.

Book Review: The Man with the Golden Touch, by Mór Jókai

In Mór Jókai’s The Man with the Golden Touch, the protagonist, Mihály Timár, builds his fortune from an ill-gotten capital. He does not connive for it, but it falls into his hands unearned, and he spends most of the book in a cloud of self-reproach, unable to enjoy the happiness that properly belongs to others. Even when he resettles the fortune upon its rightful possessors, he claims no absolution, knowing that it was never his to bestow.

“Self-reproach” is an apt term, as is the idea of claiming “absolution” for oneself, for Timár is compelled, by the falsehood upon which his estate rests, to internalize morality. The inapplicability of external moral authority, at least to him, is the main theme of this book: The Man with the Golden Touch imagines a world without external moral authority, in other words, a world without religion.

Such a world presents challenges. It may seem at first glance to lack justice. Indeed, Timár’s basic uneasiness stems from his own flaunting of it. As he muses, “‘Whatever evil I do, good comes of it, and the greatest folly I commit turns to wisdom; when will this end?’” (p. 272 of 2001 Corvina edition) In despair, Timár gives up prayer. “Through this dreadful night he dared not pray; he would not speak with God. ‘Do not Thou look where I go.’ From this birthday on he gave up prayer. He defied fate.” (p. 261)

However, in his despair Timár forgets that it is precisely in supposed injustice that God abides. His lament (again) that “the greatest folly I commit turns to wisdom” amounts to a restatement of “God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise.” (1 Corinthians 1:27) In fact, The Man with the Golden Touch is the story of how Timár (and the reader) learns this lesson afresh. Its disparagement of religion, in its narrow, doctrinal sense, leaves God’s grace reigning supreme.

Accordingly, the book is brimming with godly though unchurchly sentiments. “They had no church holidays and did not count Sundays,” reads one. “Their saints’ days were those on which God gave them some special joy.” (p. 264) Another exposition occurs in the form of a dialogue, with a straw-man priest:

‘The man is your daughter’s husband?’

‘Yes.’

‘Who married them?’

‘He who married Adam and Eve – God.’

‘That was when there were no priests nor altars. But now things are not managed so easily….And so you have allowed your daughter to live in sin?’

‘What is sin?’

‘Sin? Sin is that which earns the contempt of all respectable people.’

‘I am quite unaffected by such empty considerations….My God requires no sacrifice of song and bell, only a devout heart. I do my penance, not by telling my beads but by working.’ (pp. 336-338)

The dominion of God without institutional religion suggests a paradise or Eden, making The Man with the Golden Touch into a story of paradise regained. Timár must strive through doubt and despair to reach the place from which all men and women are said to have been expelled. His sense of unworthiness stands him in good stead, as confidence in his own merit would doom him. Jókai even includes among his characters a sort of antichrist, who threatens to sabotage Timár’s endeavor.

The Man with the Golden Touch must count first and foremost as a spiritual allegory, yet it is a thoroughly engaging one. Its Hungarian setting and cast – the Danube and the representatives of all classes who live near it – is as intriguing as always, though never overdone or clichéd. In sum, this is a book to be cherished, providing both meaning and pleasure.   

Book Review: The Baron’s Sons, by Mór Jókai

This is the second book by Mór (a.k.a. Maurus) Jókai that I’ve read, after Poor Plutocrats. I enjoyed The Baron’s Sons at least as much, simply because it is well written, with incisive words and a general strategy of understatement; and it is well translated (by P.F. Bicknell). The story of three sons’ fates in the Hungarian revolution of 1848 is absorbing and politically exciting.

In my continuing attempt to understand why I enjoy Hungarian literature as much as I do (and as I continue to enjoy it), I am beginning to detect, in addition to its appealing wistfulness, a certain focus on honor. It is by no means as obsessive (and pathological) as something one would expect in ancient Greek tales, and it may actually be a little tongue in cheek. In Miklos Banffy’s The Transylvania Trilogy (I forget which volume, though it could have been the first), the protagonist, Balint, is compelled to fight a silly and ultimately harmless duel with someone. In The Baron’s Sons, brothers Richard and Ödön have a contest of honor of sorts, which ends with a hug and with Richard telling Ödön, “I’m very angry with you.”

I hope I never run out of books by Jókai, and I’ll keep reading Hungarian novels, even if I never figure out why I like them.