1 1

Temptation

Temptation

by János Székely, translated from the Hungarian by Mark Baczoni

$19.95
$19.95
Available as E-Book Fiction Hungarian Literature International Literature
Format
This title can be purchased from your favorite e-book retailer,
including  many independent booksellers.

Buy on Amazon   Buy on iBooks   Buy on Barnes&Noble
Now in a new translation, Temptation is a rediscovered masterwork of twentieth-century fiction, a Dickensian tale of a young man coming of age in Budapest between the wars. Illegitimate and unwanted, Béla is packed off to the country to be looked after by a peasant woman the moment he is born. She starves and bullies him, and keeps him out of school. He does his best to hold his own, and eventually his mother brings him back to live with her in the city. In thrall to his feckless father, Mishka, and living in a crowded tenement, she works her fingers to the bone, while Béla shares a room with a hardworking prostitute. Finally, Béla secures a job in a fancy hotel. Though exhausted by endless work, he is fascinated by the upper-crust world 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 Béla grows ever more aware of how power and money keep down the working classes. In the end, with all the odds still against him, he musters the resolve to set sail for a new future.

Additional Book Information

Series: NYRB Classics
ISBN: 9781681374376
Pages: 688
Publication Date:

Praise

In this book, we do not smell the sultry perfume of the golden twenties. Here, the musty odor of moldy apartments, bad food, cheap alcohol, and unventilated toilets seeps out of the sides. But the book is not dull social criticism—the characters are too vital, the story too exciting. And Székely, the accomplished screenwriter, has arranged his scenes far too cleverly.
—Joachim Kronsbein, Der Spiegel

A truly great novel that brings everything together: narrative force, social history, wit, anger, grief, love and idealism.
—Angela Wittmann, Brigitte

View full details

  • Shopping for someone else but not sure what to give them? Give them the gift of choice with a New York Review Books Gift Card.

    Gift Cards 

  • A membership for yourself or as a gift for a special reader will promise a year of good reading.

    Join NYRB Classics Book Club 

  • Is there a book that you’d like to see back in print, or that you think we should consider for one of our series? Let us know!

    Tell us about it