She Loves Me

This book is really superb, and makes an excellent case for how tragically overlooked Hungarian literature is. Think of it as a Hungarian answer to Jeanette Winterson's Written on the Body. In that book, the identity and gender of the narrator fade into insignificance so that the focus can be entirely on love itself. Here, the narrator reminds fixed, but the beloved remains something of an amorphous blur, ambiguously slipping through different people in a non-linear chronology throughout 20th century Hungarian history. Esterhazy brilliantly uses sex and love as a metaphor for Hungarian politics and national identity (hardly a new trick for him) and vice versa. Thus, the book is not only an exquisite encyclopedia of love but an implicit meditation on Hungarian history. I first read this book sitting by the Danube with a bottle of bikave'r, but you don't have to be conversant at all in Hungarian history to get a ton out of this book. And it just might make you interested in Hungary as a side-effect.