A novel of three close-knit families residing on a comfortable street in Budapest, in sight of the Danube. The children, shy little Henriette, sisters Iren and Blanka, and the only boy, Balint, are inseparable. But as they grow older, romantic entanglements complicate things, and there is the small matter of Jewish Henriette's parents being 'taken away' in 1944, despite the efforts of Balint's father to save them. When one of the group is killed soon after, the lives of all are forever separated from their youthful idyll, with lifelong consequences.
Szabo does a wonderful, strange thing here with foreground and background. Most novelists would place the deportation (and murder) of Hungarian Jews, Soviet repression of Hungary in the 1950s, and the 1956 Revolution in the front of the story, and dangle their characters from these big, hulking events like ornaments on a tree. But Szabo places the interior lives of her characters at the front, adopting their euphemistic ways of thinking about various horrors, so that the reader participates in their repressed, damaged mentalities. Subtle and lovely.
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