Music for Wartime

Several of the stories in this new collection (following The Hundred-Year House) are inspired by the author's own singular family history; her grandfather was the architect of Hungary's infamous Jewish Laws before World War II, while her grandmother was a heroic, antifascist Hungarian novelist. Some of the historical tales read like fables, a fact acknowledged by the author herself in a parenthetical meta aside at the end of the first story: "(But I've made it sound like a fable, haven't I? I've lied and turned two women into three, because three is a fairytale number.)" While more than a few of the stories are set in wartime Hungary or among Hungarian immigrant families in postwar America, the subject matter and settings range widely, most strikingly in a delightfully strange and amusing tale about a lonely Chicago woman who coughs up a hairball that grows into a time-traveling Johann Sebastian Bach. Makkai is a musical writer with a strong voice, and this work is reminiscent of Elizabeth McCracken's recent collection Thunderstruck, in tone if not in content.