Péter Esterházy

Péter Esterházy (born 1950), Hungary.

Péter Esterázy, as reviewers seem to feel compelled to say as they begin a piece about him, comes from one of the most distinguished families in Hungary. If you don’t believe it, look up his last name in any encyclopedia of music, to see which musical compositions were commissioned by or dedicated to one or another Esterházy.

Esterházy spent his early life in a small village where his family had essentially been exiled but eventually moved to Budapest, where he studied math and worked as a computer scientist before quitting to become a freelance writer. Besides novels, he writes essays and short stories and turns up in journals or newspaper interviews in the kinds of contexts where you would expect to find a European intellectual. Among many other things, he addresses issues of Hungarian culture and nationalism, and Central European culture. She Loves Me does not refer to the author's pedigree, but it does refer often to Hungarian history and culture. Of course, an aristocratic pedigree was undesirable in Communist Hungary.

I love Esterházy’s writing in spite of everything (everything = the way he writes about sex or women? choosing to give A Little Hungarian Pornography that title?). Most of his books violates all kinds of norms of realistic literature -— making this a good moment to discuss post-modernism in literature, if we haven’t done it before now

Course book: She Loves Me (Egy nő, 1993), translated by Judith Sollosy.

Questions for reading:

• How much do you know about the history of Hungary? How much does Esterházy teach you here?
• How can a writer make us care for characters with such fragmentary, sometimes mutually contradictory appearances? Can we even say that these are characters?
• How do the gender relations in this novel compare to those in other novels from our readings?
• How does the presentation of sex and gender compare to that in Kundera's Unbearable Lightness?
• How is language used, especially embedded foreign languages?
• What questions does this book inspire you to ask?

Other books by Esterházy:

• Kis Magyar Pornográfia, 1983. A Little Hungarian Pornography, translated by Judith Sollosy, 1995.
• A szív segédigéi, 1985, translated as Helping Verbs of the Heart by Michael Henry Heim, 1991.
• Hrabal könyve, 1990, translated by Judith Sollosy as The Book of Hrabal, 1994.
• Hahn-Hahn grófnő pillantása, 1991. The Glance of Countess Hahn-Hahn (Down the Danube), translated by Richard Aczel, 1994, available in Tripod.
• Harmonia cælestis, 2000, Celestial Harmonies, translated by Judith Sollosy, 2004, available in Tripod.

Works about Esterházy:

• Richard Teleky. Hungarian Rhapsodies: Essays on Ethnicity, Identity, and Culture, available in Tripod.
• Drucilla Cornell. Feminism and Pornography, available in Tripod.

Web links about Esterházy:

http://www.hlo.hu/object.bfde2f02-e634-48be-abef-4bd133b1eec7.ivy

A review of his latest novel, Celestial Harmonies, on a site devoted to Hungarian literature

http://www.hunlit.hu/esterhazy?language=en

A nice biographical outline, with a photo of P. E. in his youth.