13 May 2026

Nelio Biedermann is no wunderkind

He should have waited until he was 30 to publish Lazar

Photo by Joseph Reid/ Millennium Images, UK

“For Heaven’s sake,” Virginia Woolf wrote, in an essay called “Letter to a Young Poet”, “publish nothing before you are 30.” This is such good advice that it should be tattooed inside the eyelids of every creative writing student on Earth. If widely followed, Woolf’s advice would, among other things, improve the mean quality of first novels. But of course Woolf’s advice will never be widely followed. There are always eager prodigies, unable to wait for public confirmation of their gifts, and there is always the hype machine, keen to find an angle: a match made in marketing hell.

Nelio Biedermann, a Swiss writer of Hungarian descent, is an eager prodigy. He began work on his first novel, Lázár, when he was 16. (He is now 23.) He was an undergraduate at the University of Zurich when it was published in Germany last year, and it sold more than 200,000 copies. The novel now arrives in English, translated by Jamie Bulloch, accompanied by a blurb from Daniel Kehlmann, who calls the novel “a multi-generational family story filled with deeply original characters and gripping scenes”, and concludes Biedermann is “a truly great writer step[ping] onto the stage, in full possession of his powers”.

Actually sitting down and reading Lázár will lead you to suspect that Kehlmann must be thinking of someone else here, because if there’s one thing Biedermann isn’t, it’s in full possession of his powers. Some reviews of Lázár’s English incarnation have also offered immoderate praise. A valuable and generous convention in book reviewing enjoins the critic to be kind to first novels. But the critic is also obliged to combat the forces of rampant inflation – to explain, wearily and yet again, why a successful book is no good, or to point out when a young writer has been shoved into the spotlight before he’s ready.

Lázár is about the decline of an aristocratic Hungarian family over the course of the 20th century. It begins in 1900 and ends shortly after the Soviet invasion of Hungary in November 1956. The Von Lázárs live in a manor house near a Freudian-gothic forest, keep peasants, and do things like go mad when they read a copy of ETA Hoffmann’s Nachtstücke (“Night Pieces”) too many times. The Lázárs drop their “Von” in obeisance to the democratic spirit sweeping Europe after the First World War.

The war spells the end of much else for this representative clan. (And in case you miss how representative they are, Niedermann spells it out for you: “For Lajos the end of the monarchy was the only logical outcome; he had always regarded the physical and mental decay of his father as its embodiment.”) The Second World War twists Hungary, and the Lázárs, into grotesque new shapes. Lajos, the regnant baron, ends up partly responsible for deporting Jews to Auschwitz. Under the communists, the manor house is expropriated, the Lázárs go to work on farms – “the years came and went”, “the rambling years”, “for the years had come and gone”.

There is impressive sweep, here, for such a young writer. But it is lacking in command. Big events are hurried past. Fleeting moods are harped on. Characters strut and suffer in the clenched postures of melodrama. Biedermann’s people tend to be defined by single obsessions or habits: Imre, the mad uncle, with his Hoffmann; Pista, a later son, thinking of nothing but Matilda, the girl he never gets to kiss. Pista’s sister Eva reads Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex: “When she shut the book… she was a new woman.” End of chapter. Kehlmann’s praise for “deeply original characters and gripping scenes” is puzzling. There are hardly any scenes at all, in the sense of characters speaking to each other for urgent reasons. History sails by as recounted trauma or newsreel summary. “While Ilona was busy settling into her new life, the war continued to rage in Europe.” It’s not enough.

As the book wavers between good bits and less good bits, you find yourself wanting to clobber Niedermann over the head with basic writing advice. Show, don’t tell. Write in scenes. But you also want to encourage him. You’ve got the right stuff! Just keep writing – and for Heaven’s sake, publish nothing before you’re 30. But if you must, and in so far as it’s possible, try to ignore the bleating uplift of the hype machine.