Jadviga párnája

This best-selling novel portrays a Hungarian village with a Slovak minority and spans the time from WWI, through the national awakening of the Slovaks, the Hungarian Soviet Republic, to WWII, while the story of its last surviving character reaches the immediate past. The novel is written in the intricate form of several diaries. The body of the text is the little book of notes kept by András Osztatní, the betrayed but forgiving husband, who is also a fallible man in terms of politics. After his death, his wife (and perhaps his half-sister?), Maria Jadwiga Palkovits, inserts her own remarks into the book. The manuscript is finally edited by a third hand, Jadwiga's second son, who counterpoints the passion of the first two speakers with his clumsy and badly articulated notes that nevertheless claim to be an interpretation. The lives of the protagonists are governed by love, defencelessness, betrayal and the fateful events of the 20th century in this novel written with great linguistic inventiveness.