I have always loved the dynamic of families, so I keep going back to it over and over again.
Novelist Joseph Kertes on his newest book, Last Impressions
Author Joseph Kertes
Last Impressions Joseph Kertes Penguin Canada
There’s a famous intersection in Budapest called the Oktogon. Toronto novelist Joseph Kertes still remembers it as a place of horror. He’s talking about the roots of his new novel, Last Impressions, a stirring family saga that seamlessly shifts between the urban landscape of today’s Toronto and a European country in convulsion more than half a century ago.
That country was Hungary in the midst of a heroic but futile 1956 uprising against its Soviet oppressors. Kertes was only four the day that his family abruptly decided to flee for freedom — but “five or six things I remember very vividly.” And, as he chats with Postmedia from his Toronto home, those snapshots from the past return in appalling focus.
It began as an ordinary day, but 10 minutes after little Joe had settled in his usual preschool classroom, his grandmother showed up, saying they had to get home immediately. “I remember I was very shocked,” the 69-year-old Kertes says now. And although he proceeds to describe them calmly and almost analytically, these childhood memories assume their own urgency in the telling: His parents hastily gathering together a few family possessions; boarding a train in Budapest that evening in the company of hundreds of other frantic travellers; running across a deadly minefield toward the Austrian border at night; “gathering around a lamp post and my father telling us we were in Austria.”
That lamp post signalled freedom. But there were other lamp posts back in Budapest that told a more hideous story. Earlier in the day, returning home from school,
Joe and his grandmother had passed through the Oktogon.
“She was trying to get me through quickly, but I stopped and looked up and there was a Hungarian soldier hanging from every lamp post — all of them Hungarians who had risen up against the Russians.
“I remember looking up at the eyes of a soldier, who might have been 18 or 19, looking straight down at me, and of course at that moment I didn’t realize he was dead.”
Last Impressions is the latest addition to the grand tradition of immigrant Canadian novels — a tradition that has been a powerful presence in the nation’s literature for more than a century. And Kertes is successfully navigating treacherous waters here with a novel that, for all its moments of darkness, emerges as passionately life-affirming and at times unrepentantly hilarious.
The comedy comes from contemporary Toronto and the larger-than-life presence of Zoltan Beck, an aging family patriarch who is frequently the despair of those who love him most. He has been brought irresistibly to life in this novel courtesy of its author’s memories of his own father.
Zoltan is a character who will start tearing apart kitchen fittings in an attempt to silence the droning of a refrigerator, whose restaurant visits seem to have food flying everywhere but into his mouth, and who — in one richly comic setpiece — turns his driver’s test into a nightmare for all concerned. “My father was the worst driver I have ever seen,” Kertes recalls with an affectionate laugh.
But Kertes also conveys the warmth and humanity of an immigrant Canadian haunted by his past and fiercely protective of his children’s right to happiness. That helps explain why Zoltan “can’t stand to be in a room with a miserable person.” However, there’s also the implication that he’s a haunted man in need of closure — especially since we know at the very beginning of the book that he’s a dying man.
Some clues emerge in flashbacks to the past — to when Zoltan and his beloved brother, Bela, were a pair of Jewish kids growing up in Budapest, first under the yoke of Nazi Germany and then under the oppression of Communist Russia. But it’s not until Zoltan’s devoted son Ben persuades his reluctant dad to return with him to Hungary that a tragic family secret will be revealed.
“I write fiction and I model my people after real people,” Kertes says. “But then they take their own trajectory and have their own journey.” So although his own father resembled Zoltan in many aspects, he never returned to his homeland.
“He was adamant about not having ties to Hungary anymore. He had come from a well-to-do family and he had remade his life in Canada. But he did have a brother, and my father did lose him. He never recovered from that.”
Two previous novels, the award-winning Gratitude and the critically acclaimed The Afterlife
of Stars, were also rooted in his own history. Once they were done with, Kertes felt he was finished with dark times — but he was wrong. Why did he return to them with Last Impressions?
“I think it was this notion of still needing to reconcile with the past,” he says. “I wrote it because I needed to reconcile it with memories of my father and then to reconcile them with our history. So it was a large undertaking.”
Kertes’s debut work of fiction, Winter Tulips, won the Leacock Medal for Humour in 1989, and he initially thought the comedic gifts displayed in that book would be the best portal for examining someone like Zoltan.
“So I began writing it inspired by seeing the life of my own father as a comedy, because he was such a larger-than-life character. But then I knew I had to try to explain Zoltan better, and that the only way to do it was to lay a dark history underneath all this.”
Unlike his late father, Kertes has returned to Budapest.
“I almost have a bodily reaction standing in the Oktogon today. I still have this horrible chill that comes over me. That’s what I wanted to convey with Zoltan, that he still has this terrible trauma.”
Ultimately, Last Impressions is about family.
“I have always loved the dynamic of families, so I keep going back to it over and over again,” Kertes says. He’s pleased and surprised by the feedback he’s getting from readers.
“I wanted people to laugh and also be moved, and I’m finding that’s been happening. I’m getting more emails than I’ve ever had about this book.
“And I did intend a loving portrait. Zoltan is not the most charming man — but people are complex. And the last words of the novel — ‘judge not.’ ”
I began writing it inspired by seeing the life of my own father as a comedy, because he was such a larger-than-life character.