Author Description

A Dickensian coming-of-age tale about poverty, sex, World War I, and the darker side of human nature as seen through the eyes of a lobby boy in a Budapest hotel. Abject poverty is an unusual subject for the novel, but it is at the center of John Szekely's Dickensian tale of a young man coming of age in Budapest between the wars. Illegitimate and unwanted, Bela is no sooner born than his mother packs him off to the country to be looked after by a peasant woman; when she stops paying her son's keep, he is systematically starved, as well as ostracized, bullied, and kept out of school. He does his best to hold his own, but it is years before his mother comes for him and brings him back to live with her in the city. There she remains in thrall of his feckless father, Mishka, who comes and goes until at last, once and for all, he is gone, even as she works her fingers to the bone and leaves Bela to share his room with a hardworking prostitute. Living in a crowded tenement, whose various inhabitants Szekely depicts with relish, Bela secures a job in a fancy hotel and scrapes up the money to put a down payment on a uniform. He must rise well before dawn to get to work and work until the early hours, which leave him as exhausted as he is famished, even as he is fascinated by the world of the uppercrust that his new job exposes him to; soon he is embroiled with a rich, damaged, and dangerous woman. The atmosphere of Budapest is increasingly poisoned by the appeal of fascism, while Bela grows ever more aware of how power and money keep down the working classes. In the end, with every odd still against him, he musters the resolve to set sail for new future. Temptation is a wonderfully vivid and utterly captivating rediscovered masterwork of twentieth-century fiction.