‘Siege 13’ by Tamas Dobozy

Reviewed by Lonnie Smetana

The title of Tamas Dobozy’s third collection of short stories is a direct reference to its content— thirteen stories linked in some way to the Siege of Budapest. One of the most infamous periods of the Second World War, the Siege of Budapest saw the citizens of the Hungarian capital caught between the invading Soviet Red Army and the entrenched Nazi occupying force. Natives were faced with grim choices in order to survive and it is that territory that provides some of Siege 13’s standout pieces.

When I agreed to review this collection, I was aware that Siege 13 had won the 2012 Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and was a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award for English-language fiction. I put those accolades aside and approached the stories with an unvarnished view.

After reading the book, I sought out what other reviewers had thought of the novel and was met with some hyperbole. John Barber, writing for The Globe and Mail went so far as to say “Nanaimo-born writer Tamas Dobozy has brought the short story back to the centre of Canadian literature by prevailing over four novelists to win the $25,000 Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize.” I would argue that Alice Munro has done as much to keep the short story in the minds of the novel-focused bestseller list as any Canadian author ever has. However, the bestseller list is no measure of literary quality and I would be remiss if I let excessive amounts of journalistic ticker tape spoil the parade. This is a strong suite of stories with a number of memorable voices and a unique cultural flavour. That, in and of itself, should be feted as an accomplishment.

In its citation, the Writers’ Trust jury, comprised of Canadian novelists Lynn Coady, Esi Edugyan and Drew Hayden Taylor, stated, “These stories are never less than breathtaking.” While it will seem brazen of me to disagree with a statement by successful authors, please indulge me for a moment. As much as I enjoyed the bulk of this collection, not every story is equal here.

The thirteen stories are varied in tone and in the strength of their connection to the Siege. On the darkly comic side there is “The Society of Friends,” which reads like a Hungarian-spiced Grumpy Old Men. The story is ostensibly about two men attracted to the same woman, but there are darker undercurrents that touch on reputation and the compromises made behind closed bedroom doors. “The Atlas of B. Görbe” and “The Homemade Doomsday Machine,” for instance, are stories that only have the faintest connection to the Siege and neither story is in any significant way informed by the event or its fallout. Further, the fact that they bookend the collection left me puzzled. The stories could, and do, stand alone as interesting pieces that examine unusual friendships but are not the equals of some of the true standouts.

My choice to bookend, though perhaps too obvious, would have been the two stories where I feel the collection really grips the reader. The deeply linked stories “The Ghosts of Budapest and Toronto” and “The Restoration of the Villa Where Tibor Kálmán Once Lived” are two of the most gripping stories for me. The latter story is a meditation on identity and greed that won a 2011 O. Henry Prize. With sharp prose like “for years now, his job had been destroying names, not creating them,” “The Restoration” puts its own identity, its aboutness, in plain view. It is such a nuanced story that in the span of two paragraphs the protagonist, a morally flexible man named Zoltán, is shown conducting acts of cowardice and compassion.

My other personal favourite was “The Animals of the Budapest Zoo, 1944-1945.” The story looks at the last days of two zookeepers, Sandor and Jozsef, as they try to save the animals under their care. The story inspired the book’s design as Michael Vrana chose an illustration from a suite of images titled “War Is a Verb” by Allan Kausch. The book’s design is something that caught my eye immediately and I was delighted to discover the direct tie-in with one of the stories.

In “Budapest Zoo,” Sandor’s arc in the story is one of the strangest in the book but one of the rare ones that ends on something resembling a happy ending. Sandor experiences a “moment when he was finally something else,” the type of transcendence that many seek and never attain. This story also gives us one of the more direct looks into Budapest during the siege, a city that is burning, filled by “ash rising like a million flies.” That image of Budapest remained stuck in my mind through the rest of the book.

In researching this piece, I discovered the Siege has a deeply personal connection for Dobozy. In an interview with CBC Radio One’s “The Next Chapter,” Dobozy revealed that his father, who was a child at the time, survived the siege, in part, by hiding out in a cellar with relatives. Dealing with the Siege is a topic that Dobozy had explored in passing with his previous volume “Last Notes and Other Stories.” That collection included “Tales of Hungarian Resistance,” which tells the story of the narrator’s grandfather being interrogated by the fascist Arrow Cross party in Budapest during World War II. That story’s style is more journalistic or essayistic than the crisp, considered prose of Siege 13.

In the CBC interview, Dobozy also said that one of the central themes of the book was the effect that trauma has on an individual as well as the intergenerational transmission of that trauma. This most clearly comes to the fore in the book’s longest piece “The Beautician”. Set in Toronto decades after the siege, “The Beautician” opens with a line so strangely intriguing that it demands you read on. “Of all the dissidents at the Szécsényi Club, Árpád Holló wore the most makeup.” The story revolves around the concept of identity being more about who you were at specific points in your life rather than who you are now. For the members of the Szécsényi Club, the answer to the question of how one survived the Siege is the most important part of their portrait of a person. For Holló his answer is complex and something he has buried beneath his layers of makeup. An ambitious university student brings his Siege story to light, but the motivations of both the student and Holló become a cat-and-mouse game with high stakes for both.

After winning the Writers’ Trust award, Dobozy told CBC News that Siege 13 “should be a message to all the publishers out there that the short story is still a vital form but more importantly to readers that this is really the medium that they all need to be reading.” In the face of pressure from agents and publishers to move to novel writing, Dobozy stuck to his beliefs. In an interview with the National Post, he gave an account of the effort that went into this book. The collection was the result of  “three failed manuscripts” dating back to 2006. All three attempts used the same linked short story approach and some of the material from those manuscripts was worked into Siege 13.

The short story is often viewed as an apprenticeship form before an author progresses toward more lengthy works. I am firmly of the belief that the short story is a crafted form in its own right, with its own unique problems and constraints that the novel does not have. As someone who is writing in and aspiring to be published in either short story or novel forms, I admire Dobozy’s dedication to the short story form. Often the short story, linked or otherwise, can strike the reader as a vignette. Collections like Siege 13 go beyond that. They bring the depth of a novel to the shorter form. The reader is rewarded with a fuller immersion in the character’s lives and the world around them. The reader is left thinking what a great book they’ve just read – discussions about form or length become mere background noise.

Thomas Allen | 360 pages |  $22.95 | paper | ISBN # 978-1771022040