You Cannot Forbid the Flower
Amazon depicts You Cannot Forbid the Flower as a work of fiction about a young man who struggles for survival after losing the love of his life. Hungary is his homeland, meat on the bones of Eastern Europe fought over for decades by ravenous Nazis, Hungarian fascists, and the Soviet Union. Will he survive? Will he find his true love?
But this is not a work of fiction at all. It is a beautiful elegy written by the daughter of this man, the child of a father who remained a disturbing mystery to her throughout his life. Daughters love their fathers no matter what, even if the fathers occasionally display acts of rage. Even if love is not something they surrender even to those who love them most.
The book depicts Hungary in the mid-20th century, culminating in the courageous rebellion in the autumn of 1956, when the Hungarian people rose up to throw the Soviet yolk off their backs. Their insurgency, doomed to fail, may lie at the root of the despair that compels a father to shun love and a daughter to search for answers long after her father has passed.
Unlike the typical novel format with a single hero, Chesla imagines her mysterious father as all of the fathers who fought and died for Hungary. Using poetry, news reports, and photos, she plunges the reader into an emotional journey that recreates a world history text can only guess at.
In the end, safe in America, long after Hungary has achieved freedom, daughter sits down with an aged father who finally opens up to her. Has love of one for the other survived all these years? Maybe it doesn’t matter. After all, you cannot forbid the flower.
(Ed. note: For purchasing options, please see the publisher’s website.)
