None Ofyourbusiness ❤️ 🇮🇱
Nelio Biedermann was born in Zurich in 2003, which means he wrote this multigenerational saga of Hungarian aristocratic collapse, wartime complicity, Soviet expropriation, and inherited cowardice at an age when most writers are still workshopping their first short story about a difficult childhood. He is currently studying German literature and film at the University of Zurich.
Lázár was published in Germany in 2025, won the Favourite Book of Independent Booksellers award, and is being translated into more than twenty languages.
The novel opens at the turn of the twentieth century on the feast of Epiphany, when Baroness Mária von Lázár gives birth to a boy so translucent that the country doctor can see his organs working beneath the skin. (A metaphor for a family whose secrets are about to become very visible?)
The infant, Lajos, was fathered by Pál, the water-blue-eyed stable groom, a biographical detail that Mária preserves through an act of intellectual athleticism. She trains herself to lie by lying constantly, practicing falsehood on every question from dinner menus to existential ones, until the truth begins to feel to her like an affectation.
When Baron Sándor, proud, moustached, and constitutionally incurious, finally asks whether the boy is really his, Mária calmly informs him that the child bears a striking resemblance to the dynasty's mythological founder, Hayo the First, a man so remote in history that there is no surviving portrait to contradict her. The aristocracy has always known that the great advantage of long lineage is the total absence of living witnesses.
Around this transparent child orbits a great household cast. There is Ilona, Lajos's scheming elder sister, whose talent for strategic devastation manifests early and only deepens with practice. There is Uncle Imre, who after their father vanishes into the surrounding forest, discovers E.T.A. Hoffmann's "Night Pieces" by mysterious delivery and retreats so thoroughly into its gothic universe that Sándor eventually has him painted into the blue room, quite literally, the walls of which are the colour of sedation. There is the young tutor Jonathan, who leaves scented poems under Persian carpets, church pews, and rosebeds, apparently operating on the theory that the entire manor house is a suitable letter box for his desires, with consequences that are swift and violent. And there is, of course, Mária.
Lajos grows up luminous, sensitive, and hungry for escape, dreaming obsessively of great ships crossing open water. He meets Lilly Grünfeld, a Viennese Jewish girl with blue teardrop earrings that belonged to her dead mother, and loves her with the precision only the very young mistake for permanence. They build a life of champagne terraces, leather car seats, and summers on the Côte d'Azur.
Outside their windows, Europe gets progressively uglier, but ugliness at a sufficient distance has always been compatible with a good wine list. When the Germans occupy Hungary in 1944, Lajos organises the registration, labelling, ghettoisation, and deportation of three thousand five hundred Jews from Pécs to Auschwitz, and then stands under a linden tree smoking, watching the funeral procession his own paperwork helped assemble, feeling privately terrible in a way that costs him exactly nothing.
He also hides an anti-Nazi chaplain named Pontiller in the western wing of his manor house. Biedermann gives Lajos the moral complexity of allowing him to do both.
The novel's third movement belongs to Pista, Lajos and Lilly's son, who inherits the family's water-blue eyes and its gift for loving people whose fate is already sealed.
His story carries the book through the Soviet takeover, Communist expropriation, the 1956 uprising, and a final departure by train that closes the century with compressed weight.
Biedermann aptly suggests that cowardice travels down a bloodline as reliably as cheekbones and good silver. The opposite of moral courage is very rarely screaming cruelty. It is, far more often, a man who looks at the ground to avoid standing out, who performs one small private act of decency and uses it to forgive himself for the much larger public act of doing what the regime requires.
That this argument has applications extending well beyond 1944 Hungary is not the novel's subtext. It is the novel's entire point.
For a writer born in 2003, the command of chronology, register, and moral architecture is alarming. The prose, in Jamie Bulloch's English translation, has the rhythmic confidence of someone who has read Joseph Roth, Thomas Mann, Huysmans and Stefan Zweig with genuine hunger and then metabolised rather than imitated them. The long sentences that suddenly snap shut on a single short one. The chapter that is one single sinuous paragraph of a woman walking toward water. The sixty chapters that collectively constitute a persuasive argument against the comfortable life.
The Lázárs are glass people in the end, each generation as transparent as that first infant born on Epiphany. If you look carefully, you can see every one of their organs working, and several of them are malfunctioning in ways the family has spent a century pretending are perfectly normal.
Reading "Lázár" is the experience of being handed a perfectly polished lens and invited to look, first at them, and then, with the lens still raised, at whatever is directly behind you.
❤️ 🇮🇱
Nelio Biedermann was born in Zurich in 2003, which means he wrote this multigenerational saga of Hungarian aristocratic collapse, wartime complicity, Soviet expropriation, and inherited cowardice at an age when most writers are still workshopping their first short story about a difficult childhood. He is currently studying German literature and film at the University of Zurich.
Lázár was published in Germany in 2025, won the Favourite Book of Independent Booksellers award, and is being translated into more than twenty languages.
The novel opens at the turn of the twentieth century on the feast of Epiphany, when Baroness Mária von Lázár gives birth to a boy so translucent that the country doctor can see his organs working beneath the skin. (A metaphor for a family whose secrets are about to become very visible?)
The infant, Lajos, was fathered by Pál, the water-blue-eyed stable groom, a biographical detail that Mária preserves through an act of intellectual athleticism. She trains herself to lie by lying constantly, practicing falsehood on every question from dinner menus to existential ones, until the truth begins to feel to her like an affectation.
When Baron Sándor, proud, moustached, and constitutionally incurious, finally asks whether the boy is really his, Mária calmly informs him that the child bears a striking resemblance to the dynasty's mythological founder, Hayo the First, a man so remote in history that there is no surviving portrait to contradict her. The aristocracy has always known that the great advantage of long lineage is the total absence of living witnesses.
Around this transparent child orbits a great household cast. There is Ilona, Lajos's scheming elder sister, whose talent for strategic devastation manifests early and only deepens with practice. There is Uncle Imre, who after their father vanishes into the surrounding forest, discovers E.T.A. Hoffmann's "Night Pieces" by mysterious delivery and retreats so thoroughly into its gothic universe that Sándor eventually has him painted into the blue room, quite literally, the walls of which are the colour of sedation. There is the young tutor Jonathan, who leaves scented poems under Persian carpets, church pews, and rosebeds, apparently operating on the theory that the entire manor house is a suitable letter box for his desires, with consequences that are swift and violent. And there is, of course, Mária.
Lajos grows up luminous, sensitive, and hungry for escape, dreaming obsessively of great ships crossing open water. He meets Lilly Grünfeld, a Viennese Jewish girl with blue teardrop earrings that belonged to her dead mother, and loves her with the precision only the very young mistake for permanence. They build a life of champagne terraces, leather car seats, and summers on the Côte d'Azur.
Outside their windows, Europe gets progressively uglier, but ugliness at a sufficient distance has always been compatible with a good wine list. When the Germans occupy Hungary in 1944, Lajos organises the registration, labelling, ghettoisation, and deportation of three thousand five hundred Jews from Pécs to Auschwitz, and then stands under a linden tree smoking, watching the funeral procession his own paperwork helped assemble, feeling privately terrible in a way that costs him exactly nothing.
He also hides an anti-Nazi chaplain named Pontiller in the western wing of his manor house. Biedermann gives Lajos the moral complexity of allowing him to do both.
The novel's third movement belongs to Pista, Lajos and Lilly's son, who inherits the family's water-blue eyes and its gift for loving people whose fate is already sealed.
His story carries the book through the Soviet takeover, Communist expropriation, the 1956 uprising, and a final departure by train that closes the century with compressed weight.
Biedermann aptly suggests that cowardice travels down a bloodline as reliably as cheekbones and good silver. The opposite of moral courage is very rarely screaming cruelty. It is, far more often, a man who looks at the ground to avoid standing out, who performs one small private act of decency and uses it to forgive himself for the much larger public act of doing what the regime requires.
That this argument has applications extending well beyond 1944 Hungary is not the novel's subtext. It is the novel's entire point.
For a writer born in 2003, the command of chronology, register, and moral architecture is alarming. The prose, in Jamie Bulloch's English translation, has the rhythmic confidence of someone who has read Joseph Roth, Thomas Mann, Huysmans and Stefan Zweig with genuine hunger and then metabolised rather than imitated them. The long sentences that suddenly snap shut on a single short one. The chapter that is one single sinuous paragraph of a woman walking toward water. The sixty chapters that collectively constitute a persuasive argument against the comfortable life.
The Lázárs are glass people in the end, each generation as transparent as that first infant born on Epiphany. If you look carefully, you can see every one of their organs working, and several of them are malfunctioning in ways the family has spent a century pretending are perfectly normal.
Reading "Lázár" is the experience of being handed a perfectly polished lens and invited to look, first at them, and then, with the lens still raised, at whatever is directly behind you.
❤️ 🇮🇱