I’m totally out of order in my Book Reports, and I seem to have mislaid my flash drive that had the list of Read but not Reported Books. Feh.
Anyway, when I was poking around my library’s collection of Ferenc Molnar books, I picked up Farewell, my Heart, a 1945 novel that deals with the war and its aftereffects. It’s an odd novel, a trifle racy in places, full of a sort of perplexed misogyny. That is, the main character is perplexed by his own misogyny, although of course he wouldn’t call it misogyny. He knows that his actual behavior is at odds with what he considers appropriate, and with his intentions, and he knows that he resents the women for it, although he is at a loss to explain why. I blame the patriarchy, myself.
The other and related plot point is how our narrator deals with his heart condition; he has a heart attack when he arrives in New York and some of the book is about dealing with the physical and metaphorical effects of his broken heart. I found some of this wildly distancing, because of course the treatment for heart disease was so different in the forties. Prescriptions and proscriptions that line up thematically suffer from being bad advice or irrelevant, while the most obvious (to me) dietary restrictions that would also contribute to the metaphor make no appearance, in part because they weren’t obvious at the time.
And there’s some uncomfortable stuff that comes of it being so obviously autobiographical: both the narrator and Mr. Molnar are Hungarian Jews, totally unobservant but conscious of their heritage, settling in New York after fleeing a Europe that is no longer safe but before the worst of it. Both of them are divorced and have taken up with a younger woman. Both have heart attacks in their early fifties. Both started out as journalists. Knowing that much about the similarity between author and protagonist, it’s hard not to wonder if the rest of the detail is similar as well. Although, of course, it wouldn’t be possible for Mr. Molnar to both be as self-deluding as his protagonist and to write about his protagonist’s delusions as clearly as he does.
The upshot is that this is a good book, in many ways, although it isn’t the funny book that I had wanted it to be. Is it so wrong of me to prefer his earlier, funnier stuff?
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.