#RivetingReviews: Tom Taylor reviews LÁZÁR by Nelio Biedermann, translated by Jamie Bulloch

Few books from the German-speaking world have elicited such excitement in recent years as Nelio Biederman’s Lázár. A magical realist saga chronicling the decline and fall of an aristocratic Hungarian family during the twentieth century, Lázár took Frankfurt Book Fair 2024 by storm: here was an extraordinarily ambitious work written by a 21-year-old Swiss writer of boyish good looks and precocious talents. The gloom of the literary establishment was momentarily lifted by this serious work of literary fiction; a star was born. 

With a book so heavily lauded – especially by a writer so young – scepticism is expected. But Lázár proves worthy of the commotion: a keenly observed work that blends youthful verve with a seasoned wisdom. It sits comfortably in a German tradition of intergenerational familial epics, defined by Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks and Joseph Roth’s Radetzky March, in which a family’s fortunes are set against the inexorable tides of history. Commencing at the edge of a dark forest near the southern Hungarian city of Pécs where lay the snow of the dying century and concluding by the snow-covered mountains of Zurich in 1956, Lázár traces four generations of an aristocratic Hungarian family against the interminable bloodletting of Mitteleuropa during the twentieth century. 

A folkloric mythology haunts the family’s ageing estate, its forests prophetically shrouding the castle beneath a canopy of leaves, luring enraptured victims into its thickets: born on Epiphany Eve, Lajos is made of glass, his organs shimmering beneath his transparent skin; his older brother descends into madness after reading E.T.A Hoffmann’s gothic horrors; Lajos’s mother, Mária, suffers from the broken marriage and slashes her forearms with a razor; her husband, the steely patriarch, clings to the past despite the downfall of the Monarchy, the decline of the aristocracy and the disappearance of the traditional values on which their world was founded. Fiction and fabulation are indistinguishable in Biedermann’s universe, where history itself becomes mythic in its extremity, and the supernatural the veil for decline, decay, madness, or destiny.

Eros and Thanatos permeate this book, as the depravities of the twentieth century are paired with the unrelenting, lustful urges of its protagonists. Schoolboys talk of girls to be stormed; Ilona fantasises about dominating a man who is fighting for naked survival; Pista witnesses his parents fused into a panting creature lacking all reason, all self-control, anything human. It is the darker recesses of human sexuality which take precedence here, painted by Biedermann in a chthonic morass that begins in the undulating undergrowth of the Lázár’s forest and ends in the mass rape of Budapest by the Red Army.

Private depravity and public atrocity form part of the same continuum; the body becomes the site upon which history inscribes itself. Eleven years later, as Eva submits to the impulses of a man she thought she loved, she feels more painfully aware of her body – of its vulnerability to possession and violation – than ever before. That heightened bodily consciousness takes on an almost allegorical charge when, days later, the streets of Budapest erupt in the 1956 uprising against Soviet rule.

Though Biedermann, like Tolstoy before him, insists on the persistence of ordinary, everyday human life within the vast, seemingly overwhelming sweep of historical events (Stalin, like Napoleon in War and Peace, is a bit part amidst a compendium cast of ever-changing characters), he ultimately highlights the arbitrary nature of fate. As Eva reflects late in the novel, What else does a writer do […] than strip from their characters the right of self-determination? The calamities of the twentieth century pass in the disaffected, neutral tone of a newsreel. The 565,000 Hungarian Jews murdered during the Holocaust are euphemistically subsumed by the organisational matters to which Lajos must attend; he had no other choice, hopes his son, Pista. 

Suddenly half a century has elapsed in a mere 288 pages, and the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 has begun. History repeats itself, as, once more, dead bodies become part of the cityscape. In Lázár, Biedermann shows that this recurrence is not merely external but lived. The newsreel is not for the archive, here, but for the hand that clutches the newspaper in stunned disbelief. In that regard, Eva was wrong. With Biedermann, fiction becomes the space in which both the vast sweep of history and the intimate, corporeal realities of those living through it can be apprehended, rendering the repetition of tragedy not abstract or statistical, but painfully, vividly human.

Reviewed by Tom Taylor

LÁZÁR

Written by Nelio Biedermann

Translated by Jamie Bulloch

Published by Maclehose Press (forthcoming in 2026)

December 2025 #RivetingReviews titles are available to buy from bookshop.org.

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Tom Taylor is a literary scout and writer based in London.

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