Tamas Dobozy’s father never talked much about how he survived the brutal Second World War battle that would provide a springboard for his son’s stellar work of short fiction, “Siege 13.”
The elder Dobozy was a little boy when Russian, German and Hungarian armies tore at each other in the living hell that would go into the history books as the siege of Budapest.
“My father would say, ‘I left the cellar one morning for water and there on the pavement in front of me was a soldier’s head that had been crushed by a tank,” Tamas Dobozy recalled of the anecdotes that were occasionally related by his dad, who ended up in Canada after the war.
“Or he would talk about how soldiers from the Red Army invaded the cellar where they were living and threatened them with their lives unless they handed over their wristwatches, but that’s it.”
Other relatives who had been there also preferred to leave the past in the past.
But their reluctance only further piqued the curiosity of the author, whose book is nominated for the prestigious Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction and the Rogers Writers’ Trust of Canada Award For Fiction.
“The silence around that (period) really interested me,” Dobozy said in a telephone interview from the Waterloo, Ont., campus of Wilfrid Laurier University where he teaches English and film studies. “I was drawn to it for that reason.”
His mind churning, he looked deeper into the period and eventually imagined a tapestry of opportunism, vindictiveness and desperate survival that is tempered by stories of love, redemption and loyalty.
It’s the panorama of humanity that fuels the 13 short stories collected in “Siege 13” from Thomas Allen Publishers. It uses the December 1944 to February 1945 battle not only as a setting for some of the tales but as a link to those episodes that come after, showing how the event affected not only the survivors but their families and friends.
It’s a testament to Dobozy’s vivid writing that the people and events in the book seem real and not the products of his fertile imagination. His characters live and breathe on the page and the locations, be it the dismal, war-blasted Budapest Zoo or the musty attic archive of the Szecsenyi Club in Toronto make the reader feel like they’re sitting in their midst.
“Real people doing real things in unreal circumstances is kind of the operating principle,” said Dobozy, who was born in Nanaimo, B.C.
“I don’t really believe in heroes,” he adds, saying he’s never met any of the types of people seen in Hollywood westerns or swashbuckling do-gooders like Luke Skywalker in “Star Wars.” They’re just too perfect, he says. And that’s reflected in “Siege 13.”
“We’re all very complicated and sometimes we do good things and sometimes we do bad things and it’s that oftentimes arbitrariness of it that interests me,” Dobozy says. “War is the perfect place to explore that in many ways.”
Dobozy, who is considering several other turbulent periods of Hungarian history for future works – he’s looking at the 1956 revolution and the fall of the Iron Curtain, for example – says he’s “amazed and somehow filled with grace” with his Governor General’s Award and Writers’ Trust nominations.
“Just getting shortlisted for me is plenty,” the 43-year-old said.
“Last Notes and Other Stories,” his previous work, won the Governor General’s Literary Award for French translation in 2007 although the original English version wasn’t nominated.
The Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Award of Canada will be given out in Toronto on Wednesday while the Governor General’s Literary Awards will be announced in Montreal on Nov. 13. Both awards are worth $25,000.
Dobozy favours the short story format for his writing and one of the stories in the book, “The Restoration of the Villa Where Tibor Kalman Once Lived,” won The O. Henry Award in 2011.
He chuckles when asked why he prefers writing short stories to novels.
“I’ve got a full-time job and four kids so keeping a novel in my brain is virtually impossible,” he says.
“I really love the short story form. There’s something about the screwy logic of the short story that really appeals to me and really works for me. It seems to me to generate its own material.”
He says he feels like there’s a “terrifying kind of freedom where I just get lost” when he works on a novel and that he usually decides he can tell the story just as well or better in a shorter space.
“I don’t need to waste another 75 pieces of paper.”
Although publishers tend to push novels, Dobozy points out linked collections of short stories like “Siege 13” are doing well. He noted that his is one of two such volumes up for a Governor General’s Award this year, the other being Carrie Snyder’s “The Juliet Stories.”
“The notion of linked stories is alive and well,” he said, agreeing it might be just the thing for people who say they are too pressed for time to read in today’s hectic world.
“I think we just need to pay more attention to it and get more people on to it.”
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