In the foreground the lives of Balint, with his ultimately unhappy love for Adrienne, and his fatally flawed cousin, Laszlo Gyeroffy, who dies in poverty and neglect, are told with humour and a bitter-sweet nostalgia for a paradise lost through folly. The sinister and fast moving events in Montenegro, the Balkan wars, the apparent encirclement of Germany and Austria-Hungary by Britain, France and Russia, and finally the assassination of Franz Ferdinand all lead inexorably to the youth of Hungary marching off to their death and the dismemberment of their country.
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Reviews
A Tolstoyan portrait of the end days of the Austro-Hungarian empire . . . compulsively readable.
A masterpiece, in any language.
Full of arresting descriptions, beautiful evocations of scenery and wise political and moral insights.
So enjoyable, so irresistible, it is the author's keen political intelligence and refusal to indulge in self-deception which give it an unusual distinction. It's a novel that, read at the gallop for sheer enjoyment, is likely carry to along. But many will want to return to it for a second, slower reading, to savour its subleties and relish the author's intelligence.
Just about as good as any fiction I have ever read, like Anna Karenina and War and Peace rolled into one. Love, sex, town, country, money, power, beauty, and the pathos of a society which cannot prevent its own destruction - all are here
Fascinating. He writes about his quirky border lairds and squires and the highgt misty forest ridges and valleys of Transylvania with something of the ache that Czeslaw Milosz bring to the contemplation of this lost Eden.