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manoush
Sep 11, 2015
A beautiful, quietly devastating novel. Singularly focused on four main characters and written in a timeless, crystalline prose (surely also a testament to the poet translator's skill). At the heart of the novel is the loving relationship between two aged parents and their brilliant only child, Iza, though there's an uneasy undertow to their love that quietly builds up to a full revelation in the novel's very last pages. Midway through the novel, we get a compelling portrait of the orphan Antal, who marries Iza and joins the small family. Iza, the book's anchor and central pole, remains deliberately opaque until the very end. There the author delivers a devastating verdict that leaves the reader puzzling over why, in a novel that richly evokes the inner lives of three characters, the title character is left unfurled. The novel was first published in Hungarian under the title "Pilatus" in 1963.