Hungary's literary icon, Antal Szerb, was an figure that rose to well-respected status quickly and whose life ended too early. A Jew who died in a concentration camp in 1945, his last work, Oliver VII(1942), offers none of the dark and horrific circumstances that Hungarians Jews witnessed and withstood. The wittiness of Szerb has been repeatedly compared to Luis Pirandello, the Italian playwright, but there is much more to Szerb than mere mimicry. Oliver VII is a novel, Szerb's lightest by far, that takes on the theme of self-identity, self delusion and the perception of reality. The story begins in the fictional Alturia, an unstable country where Oliver VII is king. He plots a coup against his own government, escapes to Venice, and ends up impersonating himself. As farcical as this sounds, perhaps too contrived and thin to carry a novel, it is not the case.As Len Rix, the translator of Oliver VII points out in his afterword, this book holds the most weight when it is read in the context of his two previous novels The Pendragon Legend (1934) and Journey by Moonlightt (1937). The Pendragon Legend introduced Szerb as a stylist of 'neo-frivolity' which was he immediately turned away from in the heavy and slightly morose Journey by Moonlight. But the themes of his last two novels are the same, just dealt with in different ways. As Journey by Moonlight has the philosophical and spiritual overtones that reflect the historical timbre of the times, Oliver VII, addresses those same themes in a humor fueled by resignation to the limits of the self and the world we live in. Self-deception and identity are major players thematically, but in Oliver VII the reader gets to see how we can create our own reality even if we never truly know reality. As confusing as this may seem, it is a question we often come to later in life through some time of self-examination and reflection. As if Szerb wanted to reflect and re-examine his own work, Oliver VII is his answer to the questions he posed in Journey by Moonlight. Oliver VII is a king who is tired of confines of the life he has come to know and decides that the only way to escape is to plan his own coup and run off to Italy. There he becomes comfortable as Oscar the trickster, falling in with a group of swindlers that include some ex-pats from his own country and some wily Italians. The deeper he becomes involved in the duplicitous plots to trick innocents out of money, the more he rises to his own idea of leadership. Ultimately, he impersonates himself to win back his won throne. It's a lovely, light read that asks of the reader nothing much but to enjoy, follow the twists and turns and to perhaps question the realities we have created and our roles in them. As we follow Oliver VII through his identity slumming as Oscar, so too do we follow Szerb and his journey into himself and his style. Szerb is in full control and we should expect no less from a man who was elected president of the Hungarian Literary Society. His was a literary king in Hungary at a time when being a Jew was death sentence and even though he was offered many opportunities to leave his own country, his loyalty to his country, its literary history and culture and to his family prevailed. He, a king in his own right, was put to death in a labor camp in 1945. And if you wonder what he means by "king", just a read a quote from from a Count who addresses Oliver in Oliver VII:A king isn't required to be a human being like everyone else. He must be the sort of human being who can inspire his contemporaries with awe and wonder. You see, in the long, hard year that is the life of the ordinary man, the king is a red-letter day. A holiday. A lifting up of eyes in adoration to the sky. There have been great kings who have achieved fame by destroying enemies abroad, and great kings who cared about the sort of chickens the peasantry cooked in their saucepans. But none of that matters; it's not the point. Deeds and good intentions don't confer royalty. The king fulfills his duty as a great man simply by being. Anyone can win win praise of his acts and achievements: the sole duty of the king is to exist in the world. Like a mountain. My young friend, plains can be cultivated, ships can be carried on the backs of rivers, but mountains are the only things that rise, tall and silent, above the plains, rivers and nations of the world. They simply stand there, and their existence directs man's attention to his eternal values. If there were no mountains, and no kings, my young friends, people would think that everything in the world is flat, something merely to be exploited. A king exists to draw people's attention to pure air of the peaks and the heights of destiny. He is a legend incarnate, the one great comfort and reassurance. That alone does more good for the country than fifty military barracks. It is a greater source of strength than fifty battleships. And for him to raise a nation to the heights of destiny he needs to do nothing more than emanate that strange, merciful gift we call royalty. And that is exactly what Antal Szerb did.
Anybody coming fresh to this novel might assume it was a straightforward comic novel set in some Ruritanian backwater. Many times I found myself thinking that it would make an excellent stage play — its plotting is as complex as a Feydeau farce, and at times it reminded me of Shaw’s Arms and the Man (though the latter is set in Bulgaria rather than an imaginary country). And yet hindsight informs us that this was the Hungarian author’s last work before he was murdered in a Nazi death camp in the closing year of the Second World War. It’s confusing then that there is no hint of the bloody turmoil in the European theatre of war from Szerb’s tale, one centred on a bloodless coup and laced with humorous misunderstandings and engineered coincidences.Sandoval is a painter who, we soon find, is involved in a plot to dethrone the Catholic King of Alturia, Oliver VII. Alturia, financially insolvent, is on the brink of effectively selling itself to a tycoon from Norlandia, a neighbouring Protestant country. A ragbag of Alturian conspirators, owing allegiance to a mysterious figure called the Nameless Captain, infiltrate the palace on the eve of Oliver’s planned marriage to Ortrud, princess of Norlandia; they depose the hapless monarch (who then disappears into exile) whilst also demonstrating the king’s ministers to be incompetent fools and cowards. An aged cousin reluctantly becomes the new King Geront, but the country still slides down a slippery slope towards economic ruin as the treaty to save it remains unsigned.Thus far the action all takes place in some central European Neverland. The golden sardines which decorate Alturia’s flag — representing one of the country’s remaining industries — however suggest that Szerb is telling us a fishy story. So many little details underline Alturia’s lack of luck over the years — Oliver’s predecessors include Balázs the Unfortunate and Philip the One-Eared — that I am reminded of the troubles in the kingdom of Ruritania in Anthony Hope’s The Prisoner of Zenda and, more recently, the seething unrest in Philip Pullman’s Razkavia in The Tin Princess (the capital of which he tell us he based on Prague). But events are about to take us to a more realistic setting, Venice.“A lot of people feel at home in Venice,” a character informs us. Certainly Szerb himself felt “more completely myself” there, as he tells us in his travelogue The Third Tower. It is here that ‘Oscar’, the incognito Oliver, has ended up with his faithful aide-de-camp Major Milán Mawiras-Tendal (posing as a ‘Mr Meyer’). Unfortunately Oscar has also fallen in with a group of confidence tricksters led by the unforgettable Oubalde Hippolyte Théramene, Count Saint-Germain (presumably a descendant of one or other of the historical Comtes de Saint-Germain). Into the mix stumbles Sandoval, the painter whom we first met at the beginning of the novel. And it is here in Venice that, after more misunderstandings and confusion, Oliver finds himself faced with the possibility of pretending to be himself.This is a splendid spin on the usual doppelganger theme that so many novels are based on, not least The Prisoner of Zenda. Along the way this comedy (very Shakespearean, there’s even some cross-dressing) also touches on duty and responsibility, expectations and misdirection, masks and identities. Of course, Venice is the place to have a masquerade, where virtually everyone plays a role, and while — as in many Shakespearean comedies — almost all the disguises are lifted for the audience (though not necessarily for the participants) Szerb still manages to forestall us in at least one instance: one character, about whom lots of ‘clues’ are dropped to suggest she may be other than she appears to be, not only turns out to be exactly what she claimed but also unexpectedly pairs off with another major player. I love the way Szerb plays with our preconceptions, displaying them as possible misconceptions.I must here also heap praise on Szerb’s translator, Len Rix, who as well as providing a text that reads as though English was the novel’s original language also supplies a commendable and illuminating afterword. Here, for example, he draws attention to common themes in the Hungarian’s three novels, The Pendragon Legend, Journey by Moonlight and Oliver VII, especially the last two.And now all that’s left to say is left to Rabelais, to whom is attributed this deathbed remark: Tirez le rideau, la farce est jouée.http://wp.me/s2oNj1-oliver
Do You like book Oliver VII (2007)?
Again, don't judge a book by it's author. My opinion of this book is completely regardless of Antal Szerb. OK, it's very different to Journey by Moonlight in many ways, but it does share a humour and irony, it is written in a simpler tone, but not childishly. I would compare it to Candide. Which isn't too bad a thing. I've read a lot of reviews saying things like "I can't believe this is by the same author"...and they mean it negatively, I disagree, I found it very enjoyable indeed. You get some authors who write one book over and over, some credit is due to Antal not least for stepping well aside of this.
—Ade Bd
A determinedly whimsical and often uproarious farce in which a Ruritanian monarch, chafing at the restrictions of rank, engineers a coup against himself. Seeking real life in exile, he instead ends up posing as himself. The lack of real jeopardy, the ubiquitous impostors, recall Wodehouse even more strongly than Szerb's debut; would that all revolutions could be this charming. Szerb himself, meanwhile, would die in one of Hitler's camps three years later. And right there you have the gap between the 20th century of dreams, and the bastard era as it really was.
—Alex Sarll
Úgy közelítettem felé, mint macska a műegérhez. Lassan, óvatosan, kellő messzeségből szemlélgettem, majd közelebb lopózván méregettem alakját, vastagságát, igényes borítóját. Maradék bátorságomból merítve megszaglásztam, apránként ízlelgettem fülszövegét, elmélkedtem az oldaltükör felett. Pedig karácsonyi ajándékként érkezett - s mint kiderült, ennél pompásabb nem is kerülhetett volna a fa alá -, de hát mégis, lesz-e most, agyilag kiszipolyozott állapotomban kellő türelmem a "tiszteletreméltószerbantalhoz", miután a Pendragon legenda is elárulta, az ő esetében a könnyedebb műfaj sem a Júlia-füzetek színvonalát jelenti, sőt... Be kell valljam, ez a regény felettébb kellemes meglepetés volt számomra. Pedig nincs benne amúgy semmi, amit ne aknázott volna ki már a lehető legteljesebb mértékben a komédia, mégis, a szerző intellektusával fűszerezve valami igazán kellemes eleggyé áll össze az egész. Nagyon olvastatja magát, nem bárgyú, és telve vagyon szellemes kiszólásokkal, társadalomkritikai megjegyzésekkel, finom ám célzatos utalásokkal, karakterpárhuzamokkal. Kifejezetten ajánlom!
—Zoltán
