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An Exclusive Love by Johanna Adorjan (view source)
Revision as of 14:09, 2 March 2012
, 14:09, 2 March 2012no edit summary
The narrative is partly imaginary, in relation to the final day itself, but real in most other aspects; Adorján has her own strong feelings and reminiscences about her cherished paternal grandparents, but it chronicles the heart-rending and dark times through which they lived before she was born. A cosmopolitan couple, there are tender accounts of friends and places that the family visited from the USA to Israel and Korea. For instance, she describes how in 1949 her grandparents met the elegant French lady Hélène, a psychotherapist, and her endocrinologist husband, another medical couple at a conference for Communist doctors in Budapest and then how István, an orthopaedic surgeon returned to Paris with her fretting grandmother as translator. This meant leaving Adorján's father, now a prominent musician - his name features on many classical CDs - and her aunt behind in the care of a nursemaid. These two were most unfortunately about to be stricken with polio.
This incident points up two striking features about ''An Exclusive Love'' in general. Firstly, Johanna Adorján's magical powers of description. She notes,'' Hélène lives in a small neo-classical building that looks as if it had been under a preservation order for at least a hundred years. Wherever you look you see ornamental furniture, floral decoration, porcelain plates- the wallpaper is silk, the cupboards old and decorated with intarsia work.'' She is as good on people as places; ''Hélène talks fast and at length, and laughs loudest of all at herself. She wears an elegant blouse, snakeskin shoes with bows on them, and her lipstick doesn't vanish into thin air until just before the last course. I can see why my grandmother liked her.'' Secondly, the thought-provoking, tentative style with which she makes her commentary is the written equivalent of an evocative pencil sketch. She wonders if her questioning is discourteous, ponders motives and characteristics and detail. In exactly which arrondissiment did her grandparents have their apartment? In places the sparse style, the book is only 186 pages, resembles a prose poem.
In between the quotidian life led listening to Diabelli variations and Bach cantatas, the ever present smell of Prince Denmark cigarettes lingers and the carefully cultivated roses are pruned but now we catch a glimpse of the darkness. Her grandfather is 82 and terminally ill, her grandmother is chronically debilitated by her all-pervading lack of self assurance and to add to the torpor of life in exile there are the ravages of the past. These include the mass shootings in the city on the banks of the Danube, where in front of the grey Parliament building, during the Holocaust, so many men, women and children took in their last view of the hill of Buda. Friends, many of whom perished, included melancholy Zionists from Vienna, freedom fighters and militant communists; the dedicated, the concerned and the totally innocent. ''An Exclusive Love'' does not shrink from portraying the Mauthausen SS Camp, now a museum, in which her grandfather was imprisoned in Austria near Linz, that Adorján revisits with her own father and hears the accounts of the ghastly medical experiments, the gallows and the gas chambers. She also describes the reaction of other visitors, the glib noisy texting schoolchildren and the bored voice of the guide.