His style is at the same time poetic, full of fantasy, madness, magic and death, as if a Hungarian version of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. He is also smart in his surprising way of presenting reality with a strange perspective. Some examples:
- "The war was common property and a better topic of conversation than the weather".
- "He had always been surrounded by death. On the one hand, concrete death, to which his grandparents had fallen victim and now was not spoken about; on the other, abstract death that included the downfall of the Monarchy, the decline of the aristocracy and the disappearance of the traditional values on which their world was founded".
Willing or not, the family gets swept up in the great changes of time, and their world gradually collapses, as does their family. Each period is written from the perspective of the youngsters of that time, who look back at their parents and grandparents that we have come to know so well in the meantime, which gives a nice flow to the novel. His description of the characters and their struggle with themselves, their relationships and the great wheel of history, are fun, refreshing and captivating.
On the other hand, it goes a little too fast over some of the early events, which remain undeveloped in their potential. This may have been intentional, but also not. The translucency of Lajos's skin for instance is a great idea at birth, yet it remains unclear how he suddenly becomes a normal person so many years later.
Recommended and we can't wait for his next novel.
