You Cannot Forbid the Flower. Hybrid by Elizabeth Lukács Chesla. Paperback. 206 pages. August 15th, 2023. ISBN 9781948800600.

“This fictionalized reconstruction of a life is like the symbolic Matyó rose itself: an embroidered figure; more real than real; an act of artifice to paint memory as moments across time, overlain with the onion skin of a daughter’s yearning to know her distant father. Lukács-Chesla shapes, reshapes him as he dies several kinds of deaths in flash form/micro-essay/prose poem, a region of literature somewhere between genres much like those shifting borders, declared now German, now Soviet, now Hungary, now Romania, in the years during and following the Second World War. With nuanced fabulism she superimposes upon the official accounts, revealing more authentically the manipulations of reality experienced by the displaced, as her father journeys from boy-in-love to evacuee to revolutionary to refugee. So I mean it literally, when I say that Lukács Chesla writes like a dream. She offers a life in a collage of recollections like dreams do: slivers of old lore, facts and bullet points, salami tactics, embroidered imagery, poetry, mythical rebirths, and origin tales. She is a marvelous writer whose debut novel is—along with being a remarkable act of love—nothing short of a work of flat-out genius.”

-David Keplinger, Author of Ice and The World to Come