Am feeling curious about a prolific nineteenth-century author of whom I have just heard for the first time – referred to with some enthusiasm by Patrick Leigh Fermor in his series of books about his travels as a very young man in 1930s Eastern Europe. The Hungarian author Maurus (Mor / Moric / Mauritius) Jokai, 1825 – 1904.
One learns per Google that among sundry other doings during his long life, this guy wrote many novels – historical, and other. Fermor mentions reading and enjoying (in English translation) a number of his historical ones – with wonderfully swashbuckling titles such as 'Midst the Wild Carpathians, Slaves of the Padishah, A Hungarian Nabob, The Nameless Castle, Halil The Pedlar… a bit of Net searching has revealed that in Jokai’s lifetime, his writings enjoyed considerable popularity in Europe, and were translated into numerous languages – it appears that Queen Victoria, of all people, was a fan.
A look on Amazon showed their having available in English, only a very few of this author’s works; and those decidedly expensive, in Amazon terms. Would like to try, experimentally – but the prices are a bit of a turn-off. Hard to tell whether this stuff might be good reading, if one’s tastes incline at all that way; or whether in the twenty-first century, one would nevertheless find it ludicrous.
Would be very interested to learn the views of anyone who may have read anything by this author.
Hey, I know that name! My parents had several of his books and I read them when I was a kid. Well, maybe not exactly a kid…I must have been about 14 or 15.
I liked them at the time, though now I get the feeling that I would have liked them even more if I would have read them a few years later. Not sure how to describe their overall “style”…maybe some Eugene Sue mixed with Dickens (but less darker than Dickens)?
I don’t recall very well the titles…I think I read 4 novels by him:
An impoverished noble inherits a ruined castle in Transylvania, together with old stories about a treasure hidden there in medieval times by the Ottomans (no vampires though :-))
A love triangle in the Hungarian puszta (a sort of cowboy story) … “The Black Rose” maybe?
A novel about a guy who becomes very rich due to a lucky occurrence…it has a “Great Gatsby” vibe to it, but without the love story (though…maybe there was a love story in there, but not so central to the plot as in “Gatsby”)
A novel set during the 1848 revolution/civil war (well, I’m not so sure you can call it civil war, IIRC it was hungarians against everyone else in the empire, and the hungarians got defeated in the end by russian armies, so…). It was called something like “the sons of the man with a heart of stone”
Bottom line, I would recommend his books. Though please keep in mind that I read them more than 20 years ago, so YMMV (actually, my own mileage might vary after all these years )
Too late for editing: wiki has a list of his books. Some titles seem to fit the novels I described above: “The White Rose”/“The Yellow Rose”, “The Heartless Man’s Sons”, “The Golden Man”, “Nameless castle”.
Many thanks, Dan_ch. As is often observed about SDMB: no matter how obscure a topic one brings up, there’ll be someone on the board who is familiar with it and can offer thoughts / advice !
So, you enjoyed those of Jokai’s novels, which you’ve read. You think, a Dickens parallel to some extent – I notice in the Wiki item about the author, that contemporary British readers often likened him to Dickens.
I feel encouraged to try to seek out, books by Mr. J. As mentioned, Amazon had available only a tiny handful, and they were offering those at daunting prices – nearly 20 British pounds. Am pondering on waiting till my birthday is near, and dropping hints ;); or haunting second-hand bookshops.
Am reckoning that Jokai may well be a quite close Hungarian contemporary-and-equivalent, of Poland’s Henryk Sienkiewicz (most famous for Quo Vadis?) – I have a considerable love of Poland, and have read a number of this gent’s novels (in translation of course). The majority of Sienkiewicz’s works would seem to be historical novels of Poland’s extremely turbulent times in the 17th century: I found them quite gripping, and also – to my surprise and pleasure – often extremely funny: frequent flashes of Monty Python-ish drollery from a nineteenth-century Pole ! Even Quo Vadis? – which I’d expected to be wall-to-wall devout gloom and horror – proved to contain quite plentiful touches of humour and oddity.
Many of his books are available at Project Gutenburg. By their presence there, I assume they are in the public domain–or so it says in the terms of use page.
Hoops – many thanks. I confess to being something of a dinosaur – on the elderly side, and with a rather strong preference for the “dead tree” method of presenting reading matter: but one should be prepared to attempt to be adaptable !
Interesting, I never realized these two were contemporaries. Beside Quo Vadis, I’ve read Sienkiewicz’s “patriotic” trilogy (“Through fire and sword”, “The Deluge”, “Pan Wolodyjowski”) and “Aniela”. Based mostly on the trilogy, I got the feeling that Sienkiwiecz’s works cover a larger scale: his characters are usually heroic, they’re closely involved with kings, princes and famous generals and quite often decide the outcome of battles. Jokai Mor has a narrower scope; the “big historical events” are also present in his books, but more as a background on which his characters play. Then again, I’ve read only several of his novels, so I might be completely off target.
Anyway, if you liked Sienkiewicz I think you’ll enjoy Mor too.
Thanks, it didn’t occurred to me to check Project Gutenberg. “Nameless castle” is there; I had a quick look over the first page and it doesn’t ring any bell, so probably the story with the Transylvanian castle that I remember reading had a different name.
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