A man returns to Budapest, capital of Hungary, for the first time since his father’s funeral twelve years earlier. His memory bounces off the old stones of Budapest, collides with the ghosts of History and those of his early youth.
Led sometimes by a childhood friend, sometimes by a cousin, the narrator with the “archi-Hungarian” first name of My father’s house, who has a job as a “paper pusher” in Montreal — in addition to being the author of a book about his immigration — intends to stay in the pearl of the Danube for a short week. As a tourist, a pilgrim, an exile. “To see if I’m still there,” he replies to the friend who has come to greet him.
His project, still vague, is to find the small country house of his father who remained in Hungary, an advertising photographer who has experienced a long decline. Or rather the house that belonged to his father’s third wife, an old vineyard press that he had renovated on the hillside in the Lake Balaton region, “hidden behind the devil’s ass.”
With My father’s houseAkos Verboczy offers us a nostalgic first novel, dedicated “to those who remain”, notebook of a return to the native country without triumph, in which a narrator zigzags in the places which marked his happy childhood.
An improvised quest, with light accents of road tripwhich collides with the sometimes bitter reality that sticks like a second skin to the exile: the impossibility of returning.
“I wanted to go upside down, to show the other side of the exile coin, explains Akos Verboczy in an interview. After trying to answer the question “How do we become the other?” In Quebec Rhapsody, I wanted to ask myself how we remain who we have always been. After having taken the point of view of the immigrant who arrives in his new country, I wanted to adopt the point of view of the immigrant who returns [dans son pays d’origine]. »
In his first book, in fact, the excellent Quebec Rhapsody. Itinerary of a Bill 101 Child (Boréal, 2016), this Quebecer of Hungarian and Jewish origin, who arrived in Montreal at the age of eleven in 1986, columnist, editor of guides, speeches and official reports, told the story of the immigrant who finds a new country and builds a new identity.
A scent of nostalgia
“I also sought to give a voice to those who remain, continues Akos Verboczy. To those who, for one reason or another, have never left their country. They form the bulk of humanity, since most people die in the country where they were born. And I found it interesting to explore the identity of those who do not live in exile. »
Leaping into fiction this time seemed like the right thing to do. “As writing came quite late in my life, I found it more natural, the first time, to tell the truth,” he admits, laughing. To tell significant anecdotes related to my life that could explain two or three things about immigration and integration. »
The desire to try his hand at the novel, to bend the edges of reality, came to him, he says, with the confidence brought by his first book. “Sometimes you have to cheat with the truth to make the story easier to follow and more interesting for the reader, thus understood Akos Verboczy. To make it more impactful too. I find it true when we say that fiction allows us to approach truth and reality. »
And if fiction has served him to set up sets, to make us hear sounds and smell odors, it will also have allowed the author to enter the minds of others. “It allowed me to describe events where I was not present. To describe what characters may think who are not the narrator, who is not quite me either. »
The reasons that lead him to visit the places of his youth, the protagonist of My father’s house – who looks a bit like him, recognizes Akos Verboczy – explains them badly. Walking the streets of Budapest thirty years after his departure, he meets friends from the past, a former blonde, seeing in each of them the child he once knew. In her own way, the narrator’s sister sums up this changing reality well: “Everything changes and at the same time everything is the same. »
“I always have that feeling when I return to Hungary,” says Akos Verboczy. When I go back to the neighborhood of my youth, Côte-des-Neiges, which I no longer live in, I find my bearings, yes. But what is more in Hungary is that I also find there the landmarks of my parents and my grandparents, those of my great-grandparents. There are roots in this country that I don’t have here. »
The alchemy of exile
What does the father’s house symbolize, the object of this quest for both identity and family? A space of dreams, of nostalgia? A place both rare and real where the father once showed the narrator the best of himself?
“It’s a place that symbolizes happiness,” says Akos Verboczy simply. For people to have links with each other, it takes places. We meet somewhere. We grow up somewhere. And in the book, apartments or neighborhoods, places are very important. There are also places that change and others that don’t. It’s even a bit obsessive in the narrator, as evidenced by his astonishment at finding himself in a Turkish bath in the city where, 500 years earlier, people were already soaking, in exactly the same place.
“That’s one of the big questions I try to ask in the book. Am I home? Is the narrator at home when he is in his country of origin? Is he a tourist? The people he meets always see him a little differently. And if a friend is happy to see him return “home”, a homeless man on the street will see him as a stranger. “This is the question that crosses the book a little”, also believes the author.
For people to have links with each other, it takes places. We meet somewhere. We grow up somewhere. And in the book, apartments or neighborhoods, places are very important.
At the end of the strange alchemy of exile, if the narrator has become in the eyes of his father the “son of America”, the country of his childhood, Hungary, has also become that of the father. His only legacy, perhaps, along with a somewhat derisory collection of cigar cutters, is the spirit of the place, a proud relationship to the “untranslatable” beauty of the Hungarian language. “It’s the father’s country, especially since he’s a father who has never left his country and who has always been extremely proud of it. Moreover, I found the duality between the mother and the father interesting: the mother who leaves the father, before leaving Hungary for Montreal and later settling in Toronto. »
” In Quebec Rhapsody, I had a lot of answers, I gave my opinion, I took a stand on issues of identity and culture. This time, on the contrary, I have many questions. The novel also allowed me to observe my character, create a distance and let him manage to get answers. »