A vast, sprawling novel linking a meticulously plotted jewel theft
in 1896 Budapest to the impulsive crime of passion that sinks the
plotters - and to the history of modern Hungary, of the anonymous
narrator's family, and of life on earth. Months of planning have
brought together Marton Janko, the Safe King of Hungary, his former
cellmate Socrates Andronikos, pickpocket Isaac Israel Baumgarten,
and an elusive "fourth man" - together with their women, minor
accomplices, and hangers-on - to steal the fabled Blue Blood
diamond, marked for the celebration of the Hungarian Millennium,
from an uncrackable safe in the Hungarian-Italian Credit Bank.
After painstaking discussions of ways to carry off the jewel,
trials on similar safes, and elaborate contingency plans for
eluding the police, the fourth man takes a night off to go to
"Baroness" Agnes Vad's legendary cabaret Silly Kitty, witnesses a
quarrel in which young Bora Clarendon brains her unfaithful lover
with a brick, and gets tangled in a preposterously unlikely coverup
of the crime. It's a coverup that will bring him up against bulldog
Special Investigator Dr. Dajka despite his insistence that he had
nothing to do with the crime - an affront that reduces guilty Bora,
who's fingered him, to traumatized silence and turns her hair white
overnight. Noted Hungarian author Lengyel, who makes his first
appearance in English with this 1988 novel, persistently broadens
the resonance of his criminal follies by interrupting the narrative
for the fourth man's reflections on the rise of multicellular
organisms, the dinosaur age, the generations of his family, and the
chaotic changes that have swept over his beloved Hungary in the
tumultuous century since the robbery. Lengyel's heroically scaled
assault on narrative and causality may well remind some readers of
Paul Auster, as individual characters repeatedly dissolve into
endless vistas of history - and, Ulysses-like, into an obsessively
detailed catalogue of 20th-century Budapest. (Kirkus Reviews)
Detectives and criminals engage in a battle of wits across
turn-of-the-20th century Europe from Odessa to Budapest.
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