Ladies Day (Asszonyságok díja)
Gyula Krúdy whom John Lukacs calls `the greatest
prose writer of Hungary in the twentieth century`
created a vast body of fiction and non-fiction that
remains still largely undiscovered in European
literature. Sándor Márai found his `literary power
and greatness almost past comprehension. He knew and
preserved an other Hungary that was more enigmatic,
more humane, more frightening and paradoxical than
the real one.` In Ladies Day the undertaker János
Czifra finds himself at a wedding and then in a
brothel where, via an encounter with his shadow self
Dream, he witnesses a series of bizarre and sordid
scenes. A young woman goes into labor alone and
abandoned in a dog's den at the bottom of an air
shaft. Her life story unfolds, including a nestled
narrative of murderous love set amidst tableaus of
Budapest in the early 1900's.
