Classic in Translation: Unforgiving Years

I read this book for the Back to the Classics Challenge 2018.

Unforgiving Years – Victor Serge, tr. Richard Greeman

An apocalyptic evocation of the Second World War, this posthumous novel finished in 1946 had to wait until 2008 before being published in English by the New York Review of Books. Four narratives evoke the unreal Paris of the last days of the pre-war period; the thousand days of Leningrad, besieged by the Nazis; the Gotterdämmerung of the last days of devastated Berlin; and a Mexican backwater where life and death merge. In this world of catastrophe, the protagonists - Old Bolsheviks without illusions stifled by Stalinist totalitarianism and gangsterism - fight against fascism, try to save their loves and try to “escape from a world without possible escape.”

The Unforgiving Years focuses on two Soviet secret agents D. and Daria. They are not only living through their own inner chaos but are also seeking a possible escape from their employers. Through these two characters and many others, Serge wonders, as he did in other novels, about this process and moment of the "inner break" where doubt and skepticism gradually lead the agent who had abandoned himself to the imperatives of the "cadaveric discipline" imposed by "services" to the rejection of that discipline. Soviet intelligence did a lot of dirty work during the Spanish civil war and this novel chronicles the fallout of anxiety and paranoia among agents that didn’t want to do dirty work anymore but knew leaving the “services” was as easy as leaving the mafia.

This climate where prison, exile, torture, and death threaten all the time, Serge knew personally, not as a spy but as a dissident in the USSR in the 1930s. It was his daily lot in those pre-WWII years when the assassinations and disappearances of Stalin’s opponents were warning signs to a lost generation with blood on its hands but hopeful enough not to despair of the idea of genuine​​ revolution to help the workers and peasants, to protect the revolution from reactionaries, and to defend it from authoritarianism within the revolution itself.

For twenty years, Victor Serge devoted himself to the task of giving us powerful political novels. Conquered City, set in Petrograd in 1919, is about the betrayal of democratic socialists (the Old Bolsheviks) by the Stalinists, though they betrayed their own ideals by going along with savage repression too. The Case of Comrade Tulayev, a remarkable examination of the Stalinist purge in the late 1930s, stands as a must-read for any serious student of the Europe between the wars and revolution betrayed.

St. Patrick’s Day

Troubles – J.G. Farrell

A character in this novel says that history is what is remembered, but ‘everything else’ – that is, daily life as what we ordinary people get up to - tends to be forgotten. This story examines people that are trying to carry on their regular lives while history is unraveling their Irish world.

It is 1919. Major Brendan Archer is a gentleman, a believer in honor, chivalry, and playing the game even after the Great War by the end of which some members of his generation like Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves  had said “goodbye to all that.” Too English, however, he is, not to be regarded by a dynamic Irishwoman as standoffish and stuffy. Archer has been released from his hospitalization for shell shock brought on by his service in the trenches. He visits the Victorian-era Majestic Hotel in County Wexford, Ireland, to find out if still on is his accidental engagement to Angela Spencer made while he was on a brief leave from the war.

Angela’s father Edward owns the hotel, which like British rule in Ireland, is going to pieces. Edward is hard to respect, given his snooty airs and anti-Catholic prejudices, but his dogged optimism has a certain pride.  A master of self-deception, Edward frets about renovations and conducts amateur experiments in psycho-physiology. The hotel and science are distractions so he can disregard the political troubles between Protestant Unionists and Catholic Nationalists. The escalating violence and resulting stress gradually seize his attention and steadily unhinge him.

Archer feels high-strung and restless due to his war experience. He feels tired of conflicts of any kind. Ireland, with its “vast and narcotic inertia,” casts its spell over him. He insensibly becomes involved in the Anglo-Irish family's issues and tensions with servants and tenants. Lacking boldness to get on with his life, he makes friends with the old ladies who permanently reside in the hotel. He’s also unlucky enough to fall in the love for the first time. He’s pretty defenseless, not that that makes us readers pull for him since the love object is so worthless.

Human beings are not at their best in this novel.  An old order goes poof.  But it is by no means grim or dejecting. Farrell manages cutting satire and blackly comedic situations without being mean or depressing. Long at 400+ pages, this novel has spots where nothing much happens except atmosphere and curious detailed descriptions, yet overall it’s a satisfying and enjoyable read. Farrell had soul. For readers into highly literary fiction, Ireland, or the effects of sectarian violence on ordinary people, this is a moving story. This novel won the Lost Man Booker Prize and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize.

Farrell's other two major novels also turn on a British community dealing with threats. In The Siege of Krishnapour, hostile local Indians attack a lonely British outpost in the 1857. In his masterpiece, The Singapore Grip, the Japanese invasion of the Malayan Federated States and Singapore in 1942 hands the British their most ignominious military defeat in their history of Empire.

European RC #3

I read this book for the European Reading Challenge

Eminent Georgians: The Lives of King George V, Elizabeth Bowen, St. John Philby, and Nancy Astor - John Halperin

Four 50-page examinations of an exceptional quartet connected to the United Kingdom between the wars comprise this interesting book. The title is taken after Lytton Strachey’s infamous book, which debunked four Victorian worthies in astonishing prose. However, this book is merely readable nor does it undermine the reputations of the four subjects, though Nancy Astor takes some serious lumps, all of them richly deserved.

Of George V Halperin says, “[T]here can be little doubt that he strengthened the throne in terms of its place in the hearts of his people, both by the role he played in the political affairs of the nation and the affection he commanded and held among his subjects in the Empire. Once could argue that, for the British monarchy, his reign was the most salutary in three centuries." I think even readers like me – i.e., people with little interest in royals – will get food for thought from the king’s refusal to provide asylum to his deposed Romanov cousins and his isolationism toward the Nazi threat.

Readers who liked The Death of the Heart, her best novel will like the overview of the life and work of Elizabeth Bowen. Halperin emphasizes her debt to Henry James rather uncritically. There is also the argument that her Irish exuberance was tempered – not in a good way – by Jamesian methods.

The third chapter gives an account of St. John Philby, the greatest of the Western explorers of Arabia and father of the destructive spy Kim Philby. Halperin makes clear that St. John Philby was the wrong kind of maverick personality to work in government, much less in foreign service.

American Nancy Astor, oddly enough, became the first woman to serve in the House of Commons. Despite her spotty education, her Virginia charm coupled with canny show-biz instincts enabled her to hold on the seat for Plymouth for 25 years. She fought for women and children, much to her credit. Halperin, however, smacks her around on the grounds of anti-Semitism, anti-Catholicism, and the dumb McCarthy anti-communism that gave serious anti-Communism a bad name.

Any reader who enjoys reading popular histories in search of general cultural literacy will like this book. It’s full of curious anecdotes. For example, at one dinner Nancy Astor interrupted Winston Churchill, who hated being interrupted, with “If I were your wife, I’d put poison in your coffee,” to which Winnie replied, “If I were your husband, I’d drink it.”

European RC #1

I read this book for the European Reading Challenge

The Spies of Warsaw – Alan Furst

Pre-World War II Warsaw becomes an arena of intense international rivalry. In almost every embassy an intelligence cell operates, spies of Western and Eastern powers feverishly collect information about preparations for war, both those carried out by opponents and by allies. Warsaw is full of secret agents who create a colorful society, operating under the guise of the embassies of their countries. Poles, French, Germans, Russians - everyone knows that in the war is coming and that you have to prepare for it or be destroyed. Everyone believes that by their intelligence activities they will save their countrymen from being lost or that they will ensure victory for the homeland.

Our hero Jean-François Mercier, the French military attaché, also knows that armed conflict is inevitable. At 46, he has already participated the Great War and the Polish-Bolshevik war of 1920. He has performed long and dedicated service, and he would like to leave for a well-deserved retirement, but a sense of responsibility for the fate of millions keeps him on post. He skillfully navigates in a narrow diplomatic world, but does not avoid a direct, even painful clash, with an opponent, worthy or not. His strength is certainly increased by the warm feeling of a beautiful French-Polish woman working for the League of Nations that she met at a boring official reception. Mercier discovers that first of all he is not so old, and secondly - that he is not only ready for retirement, he is ready to go to extremes.

The book details Mercier’s activities in episodes. He runs agents and even saves one from being kidnapped and forcibly repatriated to a certain death in Germany. He sneaks into Germany to observe tank exercises. On his travels, in hotels and restaurants, a foreboding sometimes comes over him, “What is going to happen to these people after war comes.” He meets ordinary people who are fighting the forces of evil – literally – because it is the right thing to do.

The settings all have evocative details of Silesia and the countryside of Poland (think rural New Jersey). Furst is also effective at getting across the mundane details of regular people doing their best in trying circumstances. We readers need the romantic angle as a break from the suspenseful intrigue and tension of Nazi cruelty. We readers also know what the characters do not: Poland is doomed to Nazi occupation and will be the most damaged country staggering out of World War II.

Two by Bainbridge

The Birthday Boys  & Every Man for Himself – Beryl Bainbridge

Beryl Bainbridge (1934 - 2010; obituary) was an English writer of short, readable historical novels.  The Birthday Boys (1991) told the sad story for Capt. Scott’s disastrous journey to the South Pole in 1912. Every Man for Himself (1996) was about the first and fatal voyage of the Titanic a month later. In an interview with TheParis Review, Bainbridge said “Those events were emblematic, as they seemed to presage what lay ahead—the First World War and all that followed.”

Told from five points of view, The Birthday Boys describes the decisions and rivalries that doomed the men on the expedition to the Pole. Out of a misguided sense of honor and lack of sense that Creation gave geese, Scott decides in favor of going on foot instead of harnessing dog teams. And the followers, out of duty, carried out their orders. The courage that makes them heroes also leads to their lonely deaths in their tents in Antarctica. It brings to mind the First World War, when generals sent men over the top into No Man’s Land without ever seeming to learn that hammering the enemy was rough on the hammer.

Researching J.M. Barrie, the creator of Peter Pan, Bainbridge discovered he and Scott had been great friends. She said, “I thought what a strange couple, but of course, the idea of lost boys in Never Never Land leads logically (to my mind) to my next book, The Birthday Boys. And that led to the Titanic.”

Near the beginning of Every Man for Himself, the novel’s rich young narrator, Morgan, takes an unauthorized tour of the engine rooms of the huge ship Titanic. Heis "dazzled” -- "I was thinking that if the fate of man was connected to the order of the universe, and if one could equate the scientific workings of the engines with just such a reciprocal universe, why then, nothing could go wrong with my world."

Such optimism and self-confidence in the face of the plaguy fact that we can’t control anything outside of our own heads. Such faith in technology. Nature, guised in the shape, size, and solidity of a great bloody iceberg, has something to say about such self-assured modernity. And a couple years later, the First World War showed, like the American Civil War did, that once started wars take on an intransigent momentum of their own. 

European RC #5

I read this book for the European Reading Challenge

Spies of the Balkans – Alan Furst

This spy novel is set in Greece in the perilous months running up to the Nazi invasion in April, 1941. The story stars Costa Zannis, a police detective who heads the office of sensitive cases. That is, with his brains and tact, he handles delicate crimes involving the rich, the famous, the important. A ladies man, he has relationships with an old GF, a British spy, and the wife of ruthless tycoon. We readers need the romantic angle as a break from the tension of Nazi cruelty and our rueful previous knowledge that Greece is doomed to Nazi occupation.

Zannis becomes involved in three secret operations. He helps a society woman in Berlin smuggle out Jewish people who have to escape or be interned in concentration camps. The British notice that Zannis has experience with escape routes so they pressure him into going to Paris to smuggle an important scientist back to Greece. The British also back an operation in which Zannis is sent to Belgrade to assist in the (historically accurate) coup by a group of pro-Western Serb-nationalist Royal Yugoslav Air Force officers commanded by General Dušan Simović.

The settings all have evocative details of Salonika, Budapest, Berlin, and Paris. Furst is also effective at getting across the mundane details of ordinary people doing their best in trying circumstances - such as the fine scene of his family packing to flee and the reaction of their worried sheepdog Melissa. The irrepressible S. Kolb, British agent, shows up in this one playing the ghost in the machine that he did so well in Dark Voyage and The Foreign Correspondent.

I recommend Furst’s novels highly but don’t read them too close together, otherwise the formula is a little too obvious.

European Challenge 2017

I will read these books for the European Challenge 2017.

1/ Lament for a Maker - Michael Innes (Scotland)

2/ An English Affair: Sex, Class and Power in the Age of Profumo - Richard Davenport-Hines (England)

3/ The Premier - Georges Simenon (France)

4/ The Judge and His Hangman - Friedrich Dürrenmatt (Switzerland)

5/ Spies of Balkans – Alan Furst (Greece)

6/ Conquered City – Victor Serge (Russia)

Mount TBR #52

I read this book for the Mount TBR Reading Challenge hosted over at My Reader’s Block from January 1 – December 31, 2016. The challenge is to read books that you already own.

The End: The Defiance and Destruction of Hitler's Germany, 1944-1945 - Ian Kershaw

This history explains the reasons why Nazi Germany continued to fight even when it was clear to the government and military that the war was lost. The book also tells grim stories about the consequences of Hitler’s decision never to capitulate. Thousands died. Concentration camp inmates died in thousands on death marches from camp to camp. German civilians died in their thousands under Allied bombing and rampaging Red Army soldiers. Three million German soldiers in the east went into captivity in the USSR and million did not return to Germany. What’s really grim about the whole story is the lack of moral courage on just about everybody’s part, military, civilian, bureaucrat, or thug. The take-away lessons do not say much for people in hard situations, in uniform or not, though the one-third that do step up are to be admired and, heaven willing, emulated.

European RC #7

I read this book for the European Reading Challenge 2016.

Little is the Light: Nostalgic Travels in the Mini-states of Europe – Vitali Vitaliev

Travel writing can appeal simply on the basis of topic. For instance, In the Land of the Blue Poppies fascinates because it’s a rare treat to read about botanizing in Burma and Tibet in the Twenties and Thirties. It does not matter so much that the author, Frank Kingdon-Ward, can come up with only flat, grey prose and his resolution to keep his own personality out of it is unwavering.

But topical appeal is usually not enough. Readers of travel narratives usually prefer the author to be charming, witty, and fun to be with. Vitali Vitaliev possesses all of these qualities as he travels in small European countries: Liechtenstein, San Marino, Mount Athos, Isle of Man, Luxembourg, the Faroe Islands, Gibraltar, Andorra, Malta, Monaco and Seborga. The last one rather dates the 1995 book because in 2009 the main agitator for the independence of Seborga passed away. Nowadays Seborgans pay Italian taxes (or evade, like the rest of Italy), participate in the Italian administrative life, and vote in local and national – Italian - elections.

Vitaliev is a Ukraine-born Russian. Born in 1954, he was graduated from Kharkov University in French and English. He worked as an interpreter and translator before turning journalist in 1981. He worked for satirical magazine, a sure way to get into political trouble. He was either expelled or defected in 1990 and had to live by his pen and TV appearances in the UK, Australia, and Ireland.

In this book, he also tells many stories of life in the Soviet Union. The main appeal of these stories is that they give the reader a sense of how bad things were before the USSR finally just keeled over of a coronary. People could not find normal products in stores. And the less said about medical and dental care, the better. This book is worth reading just for these harrowing tales.

But he’s very good just bopping around these small countries. He has his own unique reasons for liking or disliking a place. He travels to Gibraltar, Andorra, Malta, Monaco and Seborga with his 13 year-old son Dmitri. We can feel the big-hearted affection between the two before the boy has to fly back to Oz to be with his mother.

Highly recommended.

Classic #8

I read this book for the Back to the Classics Challenge 2016.

London Labour and the London Poor - Henry Mayhew

Mayhew was a pioneering investigative reporter. His articles narrated the lives of homeless vagrants, street sellers and laborers who did the dirty, dangerous, disgusting jobs in 19th century London. Mayhew interviewed his subjects about their lives and thus was one of the first to conduct ethnography. He has been respected as an early sociologist (he loved statistics), anthropologist and oral historian a la Studs Terkel.

Mayhew’s lively exposition has a vital, energetic tone that is quite engaging. He doesn’t allow his own opinions to intrude except parenthetically but sometimes he tells us that even he, a guy who has seen everything, can be surprised. He interviews a maker of false eyes:

He then took the lids off a couple of boxes that stood on the table; they each contained 190 different eyes, and so like nature that the effect produced upon a person unaccustomed to the sight was most peculiar and far from pleasant. They all seemed to be staring directly at the spectator, and occasioned a feeling somewhat similar to the bewilderment one experiences on suddenly becoming an object of general notice. The eyes of the whole world literally appeared to be fixed upon you, and it was almost impossible for the spectator at first to look at them without instinctively averting his head. The hundred eyes of Argus were positively insignificant in comparison with the 380 belonging to the human eye maker.

More typically, he steps aside and gives us the interviewees’ words, in this case those of an 18-year-old woman who sold fruits and vegetables on the street:

Only last night father was talking about religion. We often talks about religion. Father has told me that God made the world, and I've heerd him talk about the first man and woman as was made and lived -- it must be more than a hundred years ago -- but I don't like to speak on what I don't know. Father, too, has told me about our Saviour what was nailed on a cross to suffer for such poor people as we is. Father has told us, too, about his giving a great many poor people a penny loaf and a bit of fish each, which proves him to have been a very kind gentleman. The Ten Commandments was made by him, I've heerd say, and he performed them too among other miracles. Yes! this is part of what our Saviour tells us. We are to forgive everybody, and do nobody no injury. I don't think I could forgive an enemy if she injured me very much; I'm sure I don't know why I couldn't, unless it is that I'm poor, and never learnt to do it. If a gal stole my shawl and didn't return it back or give me the value on it, I couldn't forgive her; but if she told me she lost it off her back, I shouldn't be so hard on her. We poor gals ain't very religious, but we are better than the men.

As a collection of sketches topically arranged, it is not a book that one reads through. Any serious reader who wants background information to enjoy more deeply The  Big Three - Dickens, Trollope, Thackeray – should at least dip into this book, which is available on the web here and there.

Even reading gluttons – like me, who can read anything – probably ought to read it for 40 or 50 minutes and then go do something else. Like contemplate a society in which there is no social safety net, where government counts on four ends for the poor: the grave, the prison and scaffold, the armed services, and emigration.

European RC #6

I read this book for the European Reading Challenge 2016.

Another Fool in the Balkans: In the Footsteps of Rebecca West - Tony White

White collects essays he wrote between 1993 and 2005. Some touch on the politics and reconciliation between Serbs and Croats after a bitter war. White has obviously read many books besides Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, one of the great nonfiction works of the 20^th century. With humility, White attempts to combine personal responses to history and art as West did in her masterpiece. He deftly avoids the pitfalls of travels writers such as geniality (Eric Newby, In Bolivia), sarcasm (Daniel Kalder, Lost Cosmonaut), or portentousness (William Langewiesche, Sahara Unveiled).

He talks to a couple of politicians, but he focuses on writers, and artists in the visual arts. He discusses the pressure artists face in a cultural sphere dominated by sharp-eyed nationalists ready to pounce on anybody they perceive as unpatriotic or otherwise not on the team. I enjoyed his meditations on the importance of art as he revisits works of sculpture.  The Croatian sculptor Ivan Meštrović, for instance, resisted a dictator’s pressure to “serve the state” and emigrated to the US.

An indicator of a good travel book is how much the reader wants to see, for instance, Zagreb and Istria while reading the book. I wanted to pack and go, keeping in mind White’s advice to visit in spring or during the "Indian" summer - known in Croatia as babije ljeto, or "grandma's summer" - between September and November. 

European RC #4

I read this book for the European Reading Challenge 2016.

French title: Malempin

First published: 1940

Translation: Isabel Quigley, 1978

The Family Lie - Georges Simenon

In this short non-Maigret novel, Dr. Malempin must come to terms with his parent’s sins, big and small, while his young son battles diphtheria. The child’s illness has derailed family plans for a vacation in the South.

While keeping vigil over his son, the doctor is struck by the child’s unfathomable expression and wonders what memories of the infection the child will retain. This thought causes Dr. Malempin to reflect on his own past, how his own memories were formed, the parts his parents played in making those memories. Could the same process be unfolding in his son?

This train of thought, in turn, causes him to reflect deeply and turn to journaling as a way to think about his past. He goes over in memory the story of young Edouard, in the countryside, as a very young child. He feels vaguely his mother and her family’s discontent when Great Uncle Tesson marries a much younger woman, Elise. He recalls wondering why his parents, when visiting the rich moneylender Uncle Tesson and Elise every Sunday, seem unlike themselves, falsely sincere. His father is a small-scale farmer, his mother the daughter of a ruined notary, who feels the humiliation of having but little money and having to cozy up to a rich relative.

One day after visiting the Malempins, Great Uncle Tesson just disappears. The adult doctor cannot recall the exact circumstances of the vanishing of the unfriendly usurer.  Questioned by the police, his mother tells bald-faced lies, right in the front of young Edouard who know lies when he hears them. Frightened that the child has something on them and will talk unwisely to the police, his parents ship to Edouard to his Aunt Elise. Though his stay was to be limited to the time the investigators were on the case, he continued to live with his aunt, to whom he was attracted in various ways. Yeah, those ways too, Simenon never flinched from disturbing realities (see the abuse in The Little Saint).

So, this novel examines family secrets and a man’s gradual understanding of adult behavior that seemed so odd to a child. He considers the past’s influences on his own behavior. The doctor’s examination of his own childhood enables him to better understand his loveless marriage and his children. Simenon emphasizes the sharp-eyed but limited point of view of a child and the tenuous trickiness of memory for adults. We readers recall how acutely concentrated our powers of observation were when we were kids, but we realize we didn’t understand because we lacked experience of the adult world, with its mysterious  reactions and unspoken assumptions. Childhood experience shapes us without our knowledge, to affect our entire lives as adults.

In Simenon’s ‘hard novels’ – aka non-Maigret psychological thrillers – motivated by one of life’s usual crises (illness, accident, crime or family members forgetting one’s birthday), an often alienated protagonist must evaluate his daily life. Sometimes he choose another way of living but most often it’s only realization that something important happened. Sometimes he chooses a healthier way, sometimes neurosis keeps him in his rut.

My only gripe was that going unexplained were references to French high and low culture of the early 1940s. Too bad publishers were too cheap to add at the end a couple pages of notes that explained allusions that nobody in the non-French world could be expected to understand. Not translated for almost 40 years since publishers and translators were unsure of its sales, this sad novel is not for everyone but for the rare reader who, like Simenon, accepts inevitability, accepts what will naturally occur in this delightful and maddening world – and does not live "crushed by the present or fearful of the future."

My Review of Other Non-Maigret Novels by Simenon

Talatala

Aunt Jeanne

Tropic Moon

Dirty Snow

The Survivors

Aboard the Aquitaine

The Glass Cage

The Grandmother

Act of Passion

The Old Man Dies

European RC #3

I read this book for the European Reading Challenge 2016.

Budapest Noir - Vilmos Kondor

When “noir” is in title, I can’t help but have expectations. Dark story, surprising twists, thugs, smoking, adult beverages, a tough-talking detective. This mystery includes these attractions, but the investigative reporter protagonist is excessively self-controlled, mordant, a stereotypically Hungarian Gloomy Gus.  I felt this story was so-so -- a good-enough representative of the “Europe between the wars” genre that has been so popularized by Alan Furst. But remember the dark plot clearly in a couple of months? I doubt it.

The main character is crime reporter Zsigmond Gordon. The authorities are trying to sweep a prostitute's killing under the carpet, but Gordon becomes interested in the woman’s past, the events that lead up to her murder. The reason is that he saw nude photo of the woman in a drawer in a police official’s desk.

Five hundred pengős was a big and thoroughly considered investment. Anyone who spent that much for girl served important clients. And no doubt he didn’t send the gals to bed down customers in some shady servant’s room in some shady neighborhood like Terézváros. Gordon  would have been lying to himself had he denied that there was anything unusual about this particular girl. But one thing was certain: no matter what he might find out about her, in he found out anything at all, it would not be pleasant. And in all probability, he couldn’t write about it. Even if he were to find the other girls who served this high-class clientele, not a single paper would be willing to publish the article.

In tracing the culprit in the backstreets of Budapest, the incautious Gordon soon finds himself to be the witch of interest in a witch hunt.

Set in October 1936, just after the sudden real-life death of Prime Minister Gyula Gömbös, the exposition hints at the coming menace. Jewish people are feeling increased pressure, not that for them being in Hungary in the first place was a stroke of good luck. The communist and fascist powers are asserting power. Still, the focus is always on the woman’s death and the investigation and interviews. Budapest's streets, squares and landmarks are mentioned by name, which will thrill people who have lived and visited that city. Having a Hungarian grandmother, I like the stereotypes: Hungarian men are handsome, Hungarian women are beautiful, and when they urge you to try wonderful Hungarian cuisine, they stuff you with viands full of fat.

Yum.

The development of the main character Gordon takes precedence over the plot, even though he is a little more than a monochrome photograph. I liked the fact that the investigator had a job other than a PI or a homicide detective. Gordon is a real macho man who maddeningly stubborn and pessimistic, but he's smart and resourceful. And sly. Not to mention the kind of boyfriend that says things like, “Please don’t be more angry than necessary.” Mercifully, there are some normal people, such as Krisztina, the graphic designer GF of Gordon, and the comic relief grandfather, Opa, a former doctor who spends his days making experimental jams and preserves.