Celestial Harmonies: A Novel

by Péter Esterházy

Overview

The Esterházys, one of Europe's most prominent aristocratic families, are closely linked to the rise and fall of the Hapsburg Empire. Princes, counts, commanders, diplomats, bishops, and patrons of the arts, revered, respected, and occasionally feared by their contemporaries, their story is as complex as the history of Hungary itself. Celestial Harmonies is the intricate chronicle of this remarkable family, a saga spanning seven centuries of epic conquest, tragedy, triumph, and near annihilation. Told by Péter Esterházy, a scion of this populous clan, Celestial Harmonies is dazzling in scope and profound in implication. It is fiction at its most awe-inspiring.

This P.S. edition features an extra 16 pages of insights into the book, including author interviews, recommended reading, and more.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780060501082
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	03/15/2005
Series:	P.S. Series
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	880
Sales rank:	673,672
Product dimensions:	5.31(w) x 8.00(h) x 1.98(d)

About the Author

Peter Esterhazy, a member of one of Europe’s most prominent aristocratic families, was born in Budapest in 1950. His books, published mostly in Europe, are considered to be significant contributions to postwar literature.

Read an Excerpt

Celestial Harmonies
A Novel

Book One

Numbered Sentences
from the Lives of
the Esterházy Family

"Few of us can deal with the recent past. Either our present lives have too strong a hold on us, or else we are plunged into the troubled waters of the past, trying our utmost to bring back and retrieve something vanished beyond recall. Even in large and wealthy families who owe much to their ancestors, it is the custom to remember the grandfathers rather than the fathers."

1. It is deucedly difficult to tell a lie when you don't know the truth.

2. To kick off a text with a ferocious-looking baroque grand seigneur is gratifying; a thrilling, tingling sensation thrills our bosom, our computers greet us in passing, and our cook, because why shouldn't we have a cook (who we?) serves us -- a surprise! -- breaded lamb's tail, which is like calf's foot except it's more savory because it's more fragile and tender; my father, this ferocious-looking baroque grand seigneur who was in a position, nay under obligation, to raise his eyes to Emperor Leopold, raised his eyes to Emperor Leopold, on his countenance an expression of solemnity, though his eyes, twinkling and mischievous, belied him as always, and he said, It is deucedly difficult, Sire, to tell a lie when you don't know the truth. Having said that, he leaped upon his chestnut steed, Challenger, and galloped off into the discriminating seventeenth-century landscape (or description thereof).

3. My father, it was presumably my father who, with his painter's palette under his coat, sneaked back into the museum, stole back in, to retouch the paintings he'd hung on the wall or, at the very least, to effectuate certain emendations thereof.

4. It seems to me, my father said wracking his brain long and in vain, that nothing is as sacred as that which we do not remember.

5. My father was one of the most generously endowed figures of seventeenth-century Hungarian culture and history. At the peak of his political career, he bore the title of Palatine and Prince of the Empire. He turned the palace of Kismarton into a magnificent residence, building several churches and keeping sculptors and painters in his employ at Court. Several members of the family learned to play musical instruments. My father "clapped out" his favorite pieces on the virginal, Prince Pál Antal had mastered several instruments (some say the violin, flute and lute, others the violin and the cello), while it is commonly accepted that Haydn composed his pieces expressly for Prince Miklós the Magnificent, who loved the baryton and magnificence in equal measure. My father wrote several volumes of poetry, most of which testify to the influence of the great baroque poet and military commander, Miklós Zrínyi. He also published works on religion, as well as prayer books. His collection of religious psalms, Celestial Harmonies, was published in Vienna in 1711. Furthermore, until recently, Hungarian musicologists have considered him a composer of some note. Latest findings, however, suggest that his contributions are somewhat limited, not only because a number of the melodies in the book can be shown not to have originated with him (most contemporary composers worked with borrowed melodies), but because, it seems, he did not compose the pieces, or adapt existing melodies, himself. His scores are not only rudimentary and tentative on the surface, they are incorrect, too. Judging by the extant documents, the schism between my father's mental faculties and his erudition and Celestial Harmonies is so wide, especially its more intricate layers, that it would take a great leap of the imagination to span. (To mention only the most important types of suspension bridges pertaining hereof, there's the plain, the specially anchored, the self-anchored, and also the cable bridge, the slant-cable harp-bridge, the slanted star-cable bridge, the slanted fan-shaped, and the single-pylon slanted harp-cable varieties. My father played on the harp as well as the star.)

6. For the second movement of a symphony, said the youthful Haydn for the benefit of my no longer youthful, but once again impatient (overeager) father, you must be of a certain age.

7. The -- here my father's name follows -- stands for a dream. It stands for a Hungarian dream about a prodigally rich man, a lord palming inside his purse with both hands, sifting through his bank notes like chaff. It stands for a landowner, whose figure could have been taken from a folktale, weighing his silver and gold by the bushel. It stands for the wealthy Hungarian. In the popular imagination, my father's name conjured up all the things that can make life a heaven here on earth. It stood for a petty monarchy, not like the kind you'll find in folklore that stops at the village outskirts, but a demesne that is just a jot smaller than the old king's very own. It stood for fields so vast, the wild geese could not traverse them in one night's flight, let alone a man of dreams and fantasies reduced to hearing only the ephemeral screech of these nocturnal creatures. It stood for palaces with swirling towers and flapping banners gazing at their reflections in the mirror of the lake out of boredom, because their master had no time to spare for them. Palaces by the street full, uninhabited except by a gatekeeper, sitting and growing his beard, while in the locked rooms, the portraits of those who had once loved each other or had turned their backs on each other in enmity now live their private lives. The unoccupied servants are into their cups at the Ivkoff Inn on József Street, a favorite haunt of those serving the idle rich. The -- here my father's name follows -- name is legendary. At the close of the nineteenth century, when the great Hungarian manor houses began their decline in earnest ...

Celestial Harmonies
A Novel. Copyright © by Peter Esterhazy. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

Table of Contents

	A Brief Introduction	vii
Book 1	Numbered Sentences from the Lives of the Esterhazy Family	1
Book 2	Confessions of an Esterhazy Family	393
	Comments	843

Editorial Reviews

Richly rewarding. A major achievement.” — Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“This is a belated 20th-century masterpiece…. Esterházy has created a vast anti-epic.” — Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Major, massive, revelatory.… Celestial Harmonies is a great book.” — Los Angeles Times

“Filters an inherently complex story... through a playful postmodern style... promises to be an enduring part of contemporary literature.” — New York Sun

“A family saga...intricate and playful...[that] yields many extraordinary moments” — The New Yorker

From the Publisher

Major, massive, revelatory.… Celestial Harmonies is a great book.

|Los Angeles Times

Filters an inherently complex story... through a playful postmodern style... promises to be an enduring part of contemporary literature.

New York Sun

A family saga...intricate and playful...[that] yields many extraordinary moments

The New Yorker

Major, massive, revelatory.… Celestial Harmonies is a great book.

Los Angeles Times

A family saga...intricate and playful...[that] yields many extraordinary moments

The New Yorker

In a recent interview, Peter Esterhazy joked that the number of palaces he owns "can be most accurately approximated by the number 0." Not true. Celestial Harmonies is a multi-winged palace of a book, inhabited by Esterhazys but open to all. — Dennis Drabelle

The Washington Post

Splicing the fine-grained nostalgia of Nabokov's Speak, Memory with the anarchic spirit of Looney Toons, Esterhazy has created a vast anti-epic. The writer, whose family name holds a place in Hungarian history equivalent to that of the Churchills in British history, takes advantage of his genealogy by making numerous references to his many distinguished ancestors-the very title refers to a Haydn piece commissioned by one of the author's forefathers. Divided into two sections, the novel circles its mark with cunning and humor, lighting on strange outcroppings of family and national lore. The first section contains 371 "sentences," which are really micro to mid-range narratives, all of them about a "father," a term that constantly shifts in meaning: "It goes without saying. My father had many faces, one with a moustache, one with a double chin, one like a Cumanian, et cetera." Sometimes there is a direct reference to Esterhazy's real father ("My father lost all he had, not to mention the estates, the fish ponds, the forests stretching up to Mor, the houses, the palaces, the stocks and bonds..."); sometimes the father is mythological; sometimes he is extracted from another literary text. The novel's second section relates more conventionally the struggle of the Esterhazy family after 1945, when the Communists expropriated their property. Peter's father drinks, gets a job as an agricultural laborer and endures by withdrawing into an inner exile. The patient reader who perseveres through the sometimes knotty Magyar references and nods to writers like Witold Gombrowicz, James Joyce and Donald Barthelme will be rewarded with a sense of having submitted to an astonishing if exhausting outburst of creativity. This is a belated 20th-century masterpiece. (Mar. 12) Forecast: With a little luck, Esterhazy's novel might find the same kind of success as Peter N das's Book of Memories (1997), another big book from a modern-day Eastern European master. Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

As anyone reasonably familiar with Continental history knows, the Esterh zys of Hungary are one of the great families of Europe. Scion of the family, the author is a prominent novelist publishing in English for the first time. This chef-d'oeuvre reconstructs his family history in most unusual terms; anyone expecting a costume drama will be sorely disappointed. Instead, Esterh zy sets up his father as a kind of archetype ("The-here my father's name follows-name is legendary") and follows him throughout history, where he appears as any number of Esterh zy ancestors at key points, from the Turkish storming of Budapest to the tragedy of World War II and the postwar era. One senses throughout what a weight such an illustrious heritage can be and how much it has heightened typical father-son tensions for the author. The result is not exactly a novel but more like an extended prose poem on family, nation, and history, and though it can be exasperating at times one has to concede that, yeah, it's brilliant. Perhaps a hard sell in public libraries, except where literary fiction is read, but essential for academic libraries. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 9/15/03].-Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal" Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Heir to a famous name, Esterhazy (She Loves Me, 1997, etc.), drawing on his family's history, creates a lightly fictionalized portrait vividly illustrating the clan's survival through turbulent times. The story is told in two parts: the first is a fast-paced, allusive take on Esterhazy's paternal ancestors, who received their name from the Evening Star in the first centuries of the second millennium; the second, more personal and less allusive, is Esterhazy's telling of his father's particular story. Book One, rich in quotes from writers ranging from Bellow to Beckett, is a long, quick riff, in short paragraphs, on fatherhood all the way back ("My father is metaphorical"). Esterhazy recalls a range of ancestors: one was a patron of Josef Haydn's, another was running the Vatican in 1621, yet another concluded peace too early with Napoleon. In Book Two, the author recalls the changes in his father's life that were inevitable results of changes in Hungary itself as the country briefly became Communist, in 1919, then a reactionary republic tied to Nazi Germany, then Communist again until 1989. Esterhazy's father, born in 1919, began life as a count, with numerous castles and a great fortune, but when the Communists came to power after WWII and the family was forcibly removed to a small country town, he had to work as a fieldhand, a floor layer, and finally a translator. Despite the privations-little money, bad food, police surveillance-the family was close and often happy, perhaps because both parents were adaptable and uncomplaining. So, rather than a lament about how the mighty have fallen, the story is a more rueful tale of how the mighty coped: Esterhazy's father was arrested and beatenup during the 1956 uprising against the Russians, and, at school, the young Esterhazy himself was picked on by a rabid Communist teacher, though his peers didn't mind that he was a former count. Daunting at first, then richly rewarding. A major achievement.

Kirkus Reviews