Publisher's Synopsis
New Reimagined Historical Fiction from Elizabeth Lukács Chesla!
In A Boiling Over of the Masses, the daughter of a Hungarian refugee tells the story of her father's death in the 1956 Hungarian Revolution as he becomes some of the nearly 3,000 Hungarian Freedom Fighters and civilians killed as the Soviets brutally crushed the rebellion. This hybrid novel weaves together stories, poems, historical documents, memoir, and facts about Hungary and the revolution in an attempt to make sense of the twelve days that defined her father and his homeland. From the history of Transylvania where her father was born, to the first shots fired on the peaceful protestors at parliament, to the history of the Molotov cocktail, the Freedom Fighters' chief weapon against the Soviet tanks, Chesla explores the causes and consequences of the revolution in the hope of keeping their memories, and their fight, alive.
"YOU CANNOT FORBID THE FLOWER is a dark joy of a book. In this profoundly American document, Elizabeth Lukács Chesla uses the empathetic engine of historical fiction to chronicle her immigrant father's imagined life in Hungary, during the war, across time and country, and through to the other side, driving backwards and forwards across borders. The stops and starts, photographs and fables, poems and peonies: these fragments accumulate, adding weight to memory with heavy thread. A singular and gifted storyteller, Chesla unravels and re-stitches her inheritance to help us make sense of our own deep need to make sense. She unearths the tangled roots that make possible all bloom."-Kirsten Kaschock, author of Sleight and Explain This Corpse
Fiction. History.
