The Enchanted Night

I wanted to review this book because I have read the original, Hungarian versions of these tales, and wanted to see if the translations held up.

Overall this was a good book, but unfortunately I have to say that the original versions are still better!

For all of those who don’t speak Hungarian however, these will be better than nothing - and I’m so so glad that more people will be able to read these stories now!

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for providing me with early access to these.

A set of short stories across a variety of subjects. At times funny, surprising, intriguing, and tragic.

I had never heard of Miklos Banffy, whose own life is like something out of fiction. This collection of short stories , first written in the 1940s, has been translated in English for the first time, and I'm really grateful to Pushkin Press for publishing this. The very unique context of the writers background is borne out in the stories, and it gave me an insight into this part of Eastern Europe. As the book description sAys, the setting of the stories ranges from classical antiquity to Transylvania of the authors day. Some are ostensibly fairytales, but they're off-kilter: a wizard may do you a favour, but he won't be able to help you with the prince's toxic masculinity; you might play a minor but pivotal role in a war for your country, but set against the sweep of history- you might just be irrelevant , or, as the absolute gut punch of the first story reveals- it can take very little to turn humans into barbaric wild beasts! The writer has a remarkable grasp of history, and each story is so evocative it led me down multiple internet rabbitholes. Given that Banffy lived through 2 World Wars and a devastating pandemic, it makes sense that The stories are all suffused with a sense of loss , and of the world disintegrating, specially the very poignant last story that satirises the ostrich-in-the-sand attitudes of minor European aristocracy. The author seems to want to speak to the common bonds of humanity that should unite us in a crisis- his protagonists always try to do the right thing, but unlike a regular fairytale, that doesn't always work out. All you can do, though, is soldier on, and maybe things will get better! That seems to be the guiding force of the author's life as well, given his courageous opposition to Nazism. Highly recommend this haunting collection, where every story is absolutely excellent.

This was an excellent collection of short stories by a writer known as the Romanian Tolstoy. I’m not sure that I got Tolstoy vibes from these stories but perhaps his novels deserve the connection.
The subject matter was quite varied from a scene post-battle of Troy, to inviting the devil to drinks, an evil man who wears the mask of a good man, a beautiful woman sacrificed to a god in India, a young woman carrying out a ritual before her wedding, a man who swindles land from his stepson so his wife curses him by fasting(!), and most impressively for its time a story about how humans are destroying the planet. Many of them read almost like fables or fairy tales, some have a story within a story, or contain superstition or magic and there’s a lot of atmosphere. My favourites in the collection were “Little Borbalka and the Terrifying Safranics”, “Helen in Sparta” and “The Contaminated Planet”. An entertaining read.

What delighted me the most about this engaging short story collection from acclaimed Hungarian author Miklos Banffy was the fact that they are each so different, each one a new theme, a new time, a new place. It’s rare to enjoy every single story in a collection equally – there are always a few that don’t work so well – but in this case I liked all of them and once I realised just how varied they were I eagerly looked forward to the next. I don’t read a lot of short stories – they aren’t my preferred reading – but I found these ones so compelling and so well-written, conjuring up whole worlds in just a few pages. From Sicily to Venice and a supernatural element, from Helen of Troy to a Chinese prisoner, from science fiction to folk tales. There’s something for everyone here, and kudos to Pushkin Press for making them available to an English speaking readership for the first time since they were written in the 1940s. Banffy is best known for his monumental Transylvanian Trilogy, and this eclectic collection is a welcome opportunity to get better acquainted with his work.

Miklós Bánffy was by his own lights a Hungarian writer; Hell, he was the country's foreign minister*. But his ancestral estates are now in Romania, and given the way the borders have shifted in that part of the world during and since his time, it's tempting to avoid complication simply by calling him Transylvanian. Which comes with its own baggage, of course; as the introduction says, "The reader will find none of the conventional horrors associated with the name, but also nothing of the picturesque idyll conjured up in Patrick Leigh Fermor's Between the Woods and the Water." Still, one can't feel too guilty about the exoticism when it goes both ways; there's a story here with the lovely detail of its lead, a Transylvanian who seems closer to a Bánffy avatar than many of his protagonists, fascinated to visit Scotland and realise that the locations from Macbeth are real places. There are stories here set in Bánffy's homeland, and if neither horror nor idyll, they still seem like they take place somewhere a long way away in both space and time; characters have names like Demeter and Pantyilimon, and there's a sense of clannishness and frontier justice which feel more of a piece with the Bronze Age setting of the mordant Helen In Sparta than with one's first associations for the Habsburg twilight. Easy as it is these days to grasp at profundity by overusing the word 'liminal', I did find myself wondering how much of Bánffy's sensibility as a writer comes from having a deep attachment to a place which was tossed back and forth between the empires, and ill-served by them all. Many of the pieces sit oddly between the tale as once tales were told – things happen, there is derring-do and combat, often elements of the supernatural - and the short story as it would become in litfic circles – the excitement is often at one remove; the conclusion is more often a suspended and/or reflective moment than one where the threat is vanquished. It's a fruitful place to be, but an awkward one too. Put it this way; there are two stories with Chinese protagonists. One, The Stupid Li, is a knockabout satire explaining how the most stupid man in a country might come to be its leader, his asinine pronouncements examined for a wisdom they do not possess. I'm sure topical echoes were intended back in the day, but I suspect the parallels with our own time work even better; the overall effect is of a more raucous and less oblique Ernest Bramah. But then you also have The Emperor's Secret, in which a Chinese ambassador, imprisoned for decades, continues faithfully to cling to a secret about which nobody has cared for years. It's a heartbreaking portrait of duty with no external referent and feels, if not quite like full Borges, then certainly a mood he would have recognised. Now, for me, being able to do both of these things in one fairly slim book is part of what's great about short stories. But when it comes to acquiring lots of fans, becoming a literary brand - maybe not so much.

Perhaps the most idiosyncratic of the lot is the final and title story. We open on an empty-headed child of privilege, young Emilie von Moppelwahl – who is to be found in Part Two of the Almanach de Gotha – musing on the various etymologies of her family name, and how she much prefers the version where "the old German forests were rampaged by terrifying fearsome wild beasts called pugs (Ger.: Mopps) – terrifying predators the size of full-grown lions", which the dynasty's founder would fearlessly slay, to the one where he merely found the empress a more familiar type of pug – or another, even less heroic reading. As soon as we hear she's engaged to a princeling from Part One of the aforementioned volume, whom she barely knows, we can guess roughly where the story will take her – but the route it winds along still comes as a surprise, managing to encompass another horribly timely scenario (the unwitting innocent caught up in a war they never dreamed could come so close, so quickly) as well as the old, sad story whereby what seems like an enchanted land by the light of the Moon feels considerably more mundane by the grey light of day. The descriptions of enchanted moments and breathtaking views are gorgeous stuff; perhaps a little overwritten, but then to catch this mood they need to be. The satire, on the other hand, sometimes feels overegged even for satire – "she cared not a whit for the sort of pedantry that did not square with her puffed-up young maiden's snobbish pride" could really afford to lose a synonym or two. But then, there were a few times throughout the book where I wondered whether the translator was either having an off day, or else not doing all he might to show the writer to advantage in a very different language. Which is odd, because said translator is Len Rix, and of the very small amount of other Hungarian literature I've read, at least two books of it (both by Antal Szerb) were also put into English by him, working for the same publisher (Pushkin), and those were wonderfully done. Sometimes I could accept that a word choice which felt odd to me, such as the use of 'psychic' for rustic divination in Little Borbalka And The Terrifying Safranics, might well be entirely deliberate, or at least true to the original – the metropolitan writing about country ways. Elsewhere, though, are clear glitches: "Since then, for some thirty years now, he had lived in one of these prisons within five or six arrow shots of the main camp, for some thirty years now."

Still, I was reading a Netgalley ARC, so this may well be sorted in the final copies, and even if not, those are only a few infelicities scattered around a dozen stories which, if they often felt elusive, were never less than intriguing. I can't claim it's left me exactly champing at the bit for the enormous trilogy Bánffy also wrote, and whose first volume I already own, but I am quietly curious to one day find out how someone who created such self-willed, contrary, almost feline short works would read on that monumental scale.

*It sometimes seems like any famous Hungarian of the early 20th century was also active in the young nation's politics; see also pioneering trade unionist Bela Lugosi, associated with the country's communist party back before that all went horribly wrong. I've never known why there aren't more 'Bela Lugosi's red' puns from leftie goths.