Train To Budapest & The Silent Duchess by Dacia Maraini
Arcadia Books $39.99/ $29.99
The latest novel from one of Italy's most eminent writers follows a young journalist from Florence as she sets out into Eastern Europe in the mid-1950s, travelling on a train smelling of cheap soap and boiled meat, stopping continually as Cold War bureaucracy clogs progress.
She's on her way to write a series of articles on World War II genocide. But instead, after a series of false starts, she finds herself in Budapest, caught up in the Hungarian uprising where students wave flags with the hammer and sickle torn out, and burn Lenin's writing in the streets, even as Soviet tanks assemble to smash the upstarts.
Amara's reaction to these events is unconventional, unexpected, yet typical of Maraini's protagonists, who are often driven by personal and ethical commitment, regardless of the dangers and distresses it may lead them into. She becomes focused on a search for Emanuele, her Jewish friend from childhood who was wrenched from security in Italy to a death camp in Poland.
Helped by a Hungarian librarian, a part-Jewish Austrian who assists orphaned brides, and a series of hard-found friends or relatives, she follows the faint trail across a Europe still disfigured by the past war and fearful of the one that may follow. It's the drab years when "biscuits are a luxury, missiles a necessity".
Amara's quest is quickened by mysteries. What has become of people? Where is truth to be found? How and why can humans act in such evil ways?
There are revelations that jolt with their force - and sometimes with their improbability; Maraini demands a fair few acts of faith from her readers. Events constantly darken into ambivalence. Were Emanuele's parents victims or Nazi collaborators? Does Amara glimpse real people or visions? Is her final discovery, which I won't tell you about, triumph or anti-climax?
Author and characters revel in words. They rush into letters, journals, passionate speeches.
Written in an urgent present tense, Train to Budapest is packed with memorable set pieces: Amara passing though a room of prostheses at Auschwitz; the richness of a bookbinder's workshop; a glass of tea in a Viennese cafe.
Her publishers have also reissued The Silent Duchess, Maraini's novel from almost 20 years ago. The stylishly subversive Marianna, Countess of Paruta, Baroness of three other places, was struck deaf and dumb by childhood trauma, then married to her uncle.
Now, her uncrushable spirit and own private discourse, aided by the rational, renegade ideas of philosopher David Hume (actually Maraini integrates it pretty well) combine to carry her towards intellectual and sexual emancipation.
This is another story which delights in sensuous detail: luscious descriptions of the theatre built to celebrate Marianna's surviving pleurisy; the flowing Tiber; the smell of a newborn baby in its gown; jasmine and oranges and olives.
Like Train To Budapest, it doesn't spare the reader in its details of humanity's bestial sides. There's a very, very disturbing account of a child being hanged; there's a graphic burning of heretics; there are rather a lot of references to male sexual brutishness.
At the same time, it's a story that seldom settles for stereotypes or simplicity, even the numerous ugly men are objects of compassion as well as condemnation.
Rich narratives and an equally rich ethical concern characterise Maraini's fiction. You're aware of reading a major writer with a major mind. She's a fascinating - and just occasionally florid - experience. c David Hill is a Taranaki writer.
