Hits and weaknesses of the last voice that has shaken the German literary scene

Nelio Biedermann (Zurich, 2003) was twenty-one years old when he finished Lázár, a novel that portrays the fall of a Hungarian aristocratic family as the 20th century transforms until the certainties of the world they know disappear. It all begins with Lajos von Lázár, a boy born in a castle with transparent skin that lets one glimpse the inside of his body. The image announces that, in this family, nothing will remain hidden for long. Paternity, sexuality, violence, and guilt circulate through the generations like an unwanted inheritance. Biedermann constructs a lineage subjected to a double erosion: the intimate one, made of secrets and humiliations, and the historical one, caused by the collapse of the Empire, Nazism, war, and communism. Deformed or wounded bodies end up becoming the territory where history leaves its marks. But Lázár is not exactly a historical novel. Biedermann is more interested in what an era does to characters than in reconstructing it at a documentary level. The castle, the forest, the ghosts, and the deformities carry a lot of weight: the past still occupies the rooms. History enters the characters' homes, conditions their relationships, and decides what they can be and what they cannot. The book mixes registers with unusual freedom. Familiar naturalism coexists with the grotesque, melodrama with irony, explicit sexuality with decadent romanticism. It returns to the European tradition of great sagas, families in decomposition, and passions.Thomas Mann and Joseph Roth, and the play with literary tropes. Many characters are readers: literature acts as a sentimental script, and the Lázárs often live according to the ideas they have learned from books.Questioning the aristocracy

This is the key to some excessive passages. Sex, violence, and misfortune are part of an aesthetic of excess. But Biedermann does not always govern the exuberance. There are abrupt time jumps, characters that appear and disappear, and an accumulation of misfortunes that weighs more than it moves. It has moments of great power, but also stretches in which the desire to create great literature is too noticeable. The most stimulating thing about Lázár is his lack of fear. He dares with a novel of family, class, decadence, and memory when contemporary narrative tends towards fragmentation and individual experience. His commitment is to make an old literary form breathe.And this form allows him to call into question an aristocracy that does not fall only because history defeats it, but because it is already dragging its own cracks. The Lázárs live surrounded by privileges, but also imprisoned within a world that is falling apart. Decadence is also a way of looking, of loving, and of relating when the old codes have ceased to serve.Guilt plays a central role here. The Lázárs are not only victims of a brutal century. They are heirs to a social system that has protected them and, at the same time, incapacitated them from understanding the world that is collapsing. With totalitarianisms, cowardice, silence, or the inability to act acquire a devastating weight. The translation by Ignasi Pàmies allows for the discovery in Catalan of a voice that has shaken the German literary scene. Beyond the author's age, Lázár shows a writer who is still learning to master his ambition. It is not a perfect work: it has cracks and moments of bewilderment. But there is a more valuable light: an imagination capable of turning a family saga into a strange and wounded organism. Nelio Biedermann still does not know how to restrain himself, and that is, at the same time, his weakness and his wildest strength.