Lázár

Novel · 288 pages · Published 2026 by Summit Books

Silence, power and exile 

A pale child is born in the western wing of a Hungarian manor house, beside a blue room nobody enters. The household calls him Baron Sándor von Lázár's son. His body says otherwise. Pál, the stableman, stands behind him in resemblance and suspicion; Mária, Sándor's wife, knows the truth and keeps it sealed inside the marriage.

Nelio Biedermann's debut novel, translated from the German by Jamie Bulloch, begins with a private lie that trains the family in silence. Under fascism and Stalinism, that training takes public form in files, deportations, confiscations and flight.

Domestic life is the first instrument of damage. The manor trains people before history names them: rank decides what may be known, and bodies carry what speech suppresses. The novel is a generational relay in long forward sections, each passing the family's code to the next child who must learn it. Time moves in decade-long blocks, so conduct repeats on the page before history arrives to name it. Point of view stays close to whichever child is still learning, keeping fascism and then the police state at the edge of a room. The method has a cost: the cast widens faster than any single figure deepens.

The register is gothic rather than realist. Hoffmann's Night Pieces runs through the early chapters: Imre, Sándor's brother, finds a green-eyed hunter on his bed who vanishes when the lamp is lit, and ends shut in the blue room; Lajos is born a glass child, his organs visible through his skin. When Lajos takes up his organisational matters under the Nazis, the narrator declares the time for poetry over, and the spectral material leaves the prose for good.

Water runs through the book as a three-stage sequence of death, history and exile. Mária weights her cardigan with stones and wades into the pond until it closes over her, the one death the marriage cannot repackage as etiquette. The same element carries history's dead when the Arrow Cross shoot lines of Jews into the Danube, the private drowning set against the mass killing Lajos serves from a desk. It returns at the border, where a freezing river carries the crossing into Yugoslavia. The first water takes the mother down, the second takes the murdered, the third carries the last two out.

The code reaches Lajos before he can name it. Sándor is not his biological father, yet he forms him more deeply than blood would have done, teaching him by example to withhold tenderness, fear weakness, protect status and displace shame. Lajos repeats the lesson with Bertha, the housemaid, partly a flight from his wife, Lilly Grünfeld, who reads him without flinching.

The war turns this private training into public conduct. Lajos fears Hitler and shelters a dissenting Benedictine priest, Edmund Pontiller. He still works inside the machinery that registers, confines and deports Jewish citizens. His guilt belongs to procedure: offices, lists, ghetto work and trains. Biedermann's judgement falls hardest on Lajos when he remains ordinary, frightened, useful and employed.

When the war ends the Soviets come, and the household that ran one regime's paperwork is dispossessed by the next. Officers arrive at the manor, drink coffee in the drawing room and give the family one hour to pack; land, furniture and silver pass to the state. The scene gains force through administrative calm. In Budapest the police state arrives as suspected microphones, informers, night arrests and a Communist Manifesto placed near the door after dark, hidden beneath hats by morning.

The next to inherit the silence is Pista, Lajos and Lilly's son, a quiet boy who learns the house by reading the adults in it. His love for Matilda Telkes begins with letters, a held hand and one kiss. In ruined Budapest, Dora tells him what his protected life withheld: Matilda was Jewish, and the Arrow Cross killed her family. It leaves him grief, shame and belated knowledge.

The book saves its hardest section for Eva. Her life on the farm after banishment opens into labour, bodily confidence and sexual curiosity; her assault by Ákos closes that discovery with brutal economy. Her violation falls inside the days of the Hungarian uprising: Stalin's statue comes down, Soviet tanks enter Budapest and Eva lies in the darkened connecting room while church music plays from the kitchen. In a late hospital visit, Imre's circling hand and sudden speech send Pista back to the blue room, the forest and the old house. Imre has carried the family's buried damage in a form nobody could use until loss made the siblings able to read it.

At its best the prose is spare and procedural, letting detail harden into judgement: Lajos watching Jews walk to the station; Pista realising he cannot protect his sister, only remain near her. Weaker passages press too much into one surface: Eva's reflections in the rice fields strain under explanation where labour, desire and heat already mark the change.

Lázár begins with inheritance and ends with exile. By the final pages the manor is a photograph in a rucksack. Pista and Eva cross through snow with bread, passports and a knife, moving into a life they cannot yet picture. What remains is relation: two siblings walking out of history's wreckage together.