At 23, a Swiss writer maps a century of Hungarian family history in one novel

Nelio Biedermann is 23 years old, and his novel 'Lázár' has become what El País describes as a literary phenomenon, already translated into more than 25 languages. The book draws on his own family history: Hungarian aristocrats whose fortunes track the upheavals of the twentieth century, from empire to war to the decades that followed.

According to El País, Biedermann built the novel around this inherited material, using his ancestors as a lens onto a century of European convulsion rather than writing straight family memoir. The scale of the ambition — one life's work compressed into a debut by a writer barely out of his teens — is part of what has drawn attention to the book internationally.

Olvidar es una forma comprensible de sobrellevar la Historia.

Nelio Biedermann, to El País

The remark, on forgetting as a way of coping with history, points to one of the novel's preoccupations: how families and nations manage what they choose to remember of a violent century. El País does not specify a publisher, a page count or a French edition in its report, and no further detail on translation into French has yet surfaced.