• the year is 1904, (the year the Hungarian Parliament building was completed – the architect went blind before the building was completed).
• First Count Balint Abady is passed by all the eager and speeding nobility while he is content to take his time.
• Everything seems a bit crumbling at the slightest edges. The towels are dirty, there are cups laying about.
• The castle was just built over a Roman Fort, could only withstand the most minor seige, and is ornate beyond any original function, oriental even.
• ‘Unter Larven die einzig fuhlende Brust’ in all these grubs just one faithful heart.
• everyone is splintered off into ever smaller and fiercer factions
• The old woman too short by a head does not grow taller just by changing chairs.
• A fish without bones, a nation in appearance only, no structure underneath.
• the music stopped as if cut by scissors.
• Uncle Dani: ‘You are a m-m-monumental f-f-fraud!’ he later gets nostalgic at the books as he recalls his ruined life, throws up and passes out on the floor.
• They all barely fit in the diving room, the band nearly trips over the guests.
• Valse Macabre is the false death. A sad song nobody wants to hear.
• distance and nearness did not exist
• Adrienne believes everything is a lie, is deception. She compares the soft Hill with its reality of just bring made of clay and fit only for grazing sheep
• not all memories can be wished back
• he is a romantic just living for now and not worried about tomorrow
• what was the use of a few commonplace words in the sober light of day?
• the interruption of the dancers all crashing about is wonderful
• the library is filed with books from when transylvania had been cultivated, but cultivated by books written by foreigners
• anyone who tries to do what he can’t do is mad – said the old actor
  the mathematician is too proud to ever invent the plane, especially since the Wright Brothers already did anyway. And the old count just sees this as a toy and the actor as another way for men to kill each other.
• The old horse found its way back to the safety of the barn – it can’t handle freedom or even fun
• the servants run the show, they are not afraid of anyone who pays them.
• Laszlo considered his law school days carefree and now music school as hard work
• His father never finished building that country house
• forget school, go hunting instead!
• the best Hungarian soldier can only speak broken Hungarian because he was always with German regiments
• an endless hunting story that’s always interrupted
• Kronos and Psyche clock… A titan and cupid?
• Count Leopold Berchtold
• both of them worry that they are not part of the people around them, they are second class citizens somehow
• after all what foreigner understood Hungarian?
• All dresses in different clothes, either old hunting clothes or English style, some not even matching
• in War and Peace the hunt seems like it can stay almost any time and on any whim, here they wear numbers on their clothes to coordinate everything
• “the old soldier began to get angry, and the angrier he became so the thick smoke from his guns curled around him like the symbol of his wrath.” 21%
• sit him between two pretty girls, give him some wine and soon he’ll be happy again.
• he combines the shooting of birds with a marriage possibility with the annexation of the Balkans.
• Beautiful description of the mountains. He uses color a lot to emphasize setting, either in nature or in local dress. Balint seems more nature and Laszlo is more social. Funny that Balint is the politician
• he doesn’t speak Romanian and has been curt with the people working for him so he’s an outsider on his own property
• The Kalotaszeg people and their buffaloes wrapped up in blankets remind me of wild babushkas
• The little orthodox church’s murals show the devils swallowing up sinners, all Hungarian, while all the saved are Romanian
• The sick boy ask wrapped up outside the cold is an ominous image. Like some dying Hungarian sphinx, but next after crossing the rickety bridge, they come upon the waterfall which he describes as having an unquenchable will to live.
• look up Istvan Keglevich (old politician) never mind, he challenged a younger man to a duel, thrust once, the young man stepped back and speared Keglevich
• He thinks of Adrienne, decides instead on a cocotte, remembers being taught by an experienced woman the moves of love, can’t remember her name, then checks his pockets to make sure he hasn’t forgotten anything. That’s how this whole book is written, intertwined yet still leisurely.
• It’s always the unexpected here, he quickly turns hey hand over and kisses get palm, he walks home in dancing shoes that make little shapes in the fresh snow. Then there is the drifting narrator, usually focused but always willing to jump to another character and get their story and feelings. Absolutely beautiful.
• He made a firm commitment to Adrienne and left no doubt and did not hide his feelings from her. He’ll have to do the same politicaly soon.
• punctuation even plays a role. Uzdy, already described as cold to his wife, is said to like to arrive unannounced to his other properties because “it kept everyone on their toes!”. The very next sentence is Adrienne’s body relaxing at learning he isn’t home
• They live in the old servants Quarters (now conveyed) of their home.
• He uses the word atavistic when describing the fear Adrienne goes through when having sex with Pali Uzdy “recurrence in an organism of a trait or character typical of an ancestral form and usually due to genetic recombination”. Old families and new, marriage of convenience, like the empire
• I love how we’re always going back and reliving scenes previous through another characters eyes. Now we get Adrienne recalling AB and view be looked at the ball when he said he loved her. His shiny mustache, his hair a little longer than other young men, how it glowed in the candlelight. Good blonde hair, lighter mustache, steel gray eyes, thin young man’s face, straight nose. We get a romantic impression and a fuller picture.
• We are shown that her sisters can’t see her face in the candlelight and that she is surrounded by her lace pillows – she’s not sick and hiding – then we get Balint Abady’s impressionist image surrounded by shimmering candlelight and a soft glow around him, too.
• “He had thought that Adrienne was different, sincere, true, and straight, not to be played with like other married women he had known. ” HA!
• When Abady chooses Dodo at the ball when he thinks Adrienne had played him, she thinks he came to her because of a man named Farkas who had arranged it and she gave him a grateful glance. He had nothing to do with it and probably wondered what they glance was all about. Miscommunication of relationships.
• Egon Wickwitz is the young officer with financial issues and lots of money he owes to Dinora.
• Uncle Ambrus is the older guy who wins at cards against young men all the time but acts like it’s just dumb luck and everyone is happy about losing because he’s good etiquette about it
• After Akos Miloth made everyone dance and is all out of breath, he sits down and the chapter ends with him saying “Do you remember, dear Aniko, how in our day…” leaving us hanging with that nostalgia after an old man had come to life and lead everyone in dancing like he used to. Brilliant.
• I love that the musician Jaji Pongracz knows the intimate details of each of his listeners love lives and gwzrs to then at certain points in the song to let then know he’s playing this part for them. Remarkable that a musician had done this.
• old drunk Dani Kendy had once been rich and was welcome at the court of Empress Eugenie at Biarritz. “le comte Candi (Count Candy)”
• Why does Pityu Kendy start yelling “God dammit” and toss the goblet over? Dani even gets riled up when AB Gets mad. Were they thinking of lost family glory because of the music, is Pityu angry with Dani, how pathetic the old drunk is now who has to be carted odd lest he throw up again from standing up too fast.
• Major Bogacsy is supposed to be looking after the welfare of Hungarian orphans but really only cares about duels and disputes of honor Kolozsvar. He tries to look like a lion with all his facial hair but instead looks like a tomcat who stole a sausage.
• His mother’s “friend”, one of the knitters Mrs Baczo, knows secret ways around the house even Balint don’t know of. Also, the servants run things, she makes sure his mother does not know of duel.
• When asked to make peace before the duel, etiquette demanded both men remain silent, even when asked a third time. All a charade. And the whole thing was a farce ending with little more than paper cuts and the doctors claimed they were in imminent danger of dying.
• Is Pali Uzdy crazy or is he somehow threatening Balint first by firing off the gun in the club and then saying if he was to really be mad at someone he’d just shoot them and pats AB on the shoulder. He can’t be that dumb
• Dr Aurel Timisan, a Romanian who speaks excellent Hungarian. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transylvanian_Memorandum He wants Romanians to have the same rights as Hungarians. Apparently ethnic Romanians living in Hungary must be subjected to Hungary even though the two nations are allies – mistrustful allies. Could be based on Vasile Lucaciu
• Paprika chicken and fried dumplings!
• It’s funny that nobody seems to know why anyone is doing anything, everything is a misunderstanding and so everyone just acts pog their own interests by saying everything is on shambles and their rent should be reduced. such as the carpenter.
• Of course the poor farmers are suspicious of a phrase like “God helps those who help themselves!” AB had said this just as a bit of rhetoric but this seems suspicious – is he helping himself at their expense? They are always being cheated so why trust him? They want a tangible promise instead.

• Funny how they bought his election, lie to him that they did buy it, he wants to make genuine improvements that nobody wants even though they helped him get elected.
• “People at the top don’t realize, when they make even a quite simple order, that all of the burden falls on those on the lowest rung of the ladder.” said the notary, Daniel Kovacs
• Banffy’s understanding of how politics really works – at all levels – is impressive. Very intelligent person.
• He describes the building as smelling like sawdust and then we get the image of a small child sitting in the floor and eating an apple. The mix of smell and visual is wonderful
• After he tried to have sex with her they go on the walk to the cemetery ‘Hazsongard’, which had no meaning in Hungarian, though might be German for where hares are found ‘Hasengarten’.
• Love the image of her husband standing in front of the fire like a Devil. and so menacing he is every time
• Does her lack of sexuality mirror the Empire, she looks great but it impotent and unable to love?
• Playing cards and all that money like it’s a toy, not real, and it’s all theater, even when you are at the bottom of the pecking order.
• I love the guy with the monocle
• Dominus vobiscum, “the Lord will be with you”, saying ‘banco’, gambling, is the most lordly thing a gentleman can do. What can be more lordly then saying banco?
• The men gather together and gamble bit the women pick insipid spinsters so they won’t have any competition for their game.
• The order of the golden fleece is a special group of nobles who along with the king are the most important. They have special rights and even confer for things such as of they should go to war.
• Walls painted pale gray, sofas with sugar pink cushions, divans with poison green brocade and lemon yellow and black cushions. Fanny’s red gold hair like a flame, the use of word poison seems to foreshadow disaster? The table lit so that the black walls and black ceiling were not visible and so they were like an isolated island with darkness around them. He sits with his face to the world but his back to ‘untold terrors’
• “The feast had been prepared so knowingly that it seemed to Laszlo that everyone present ate and drank more voraciously than usual and chatted with more hectic vivacity, as if they were driven to enjoy themselves while there was still time.”
• When they look into the shop window and she says the chintz covers are like the one she has in her own room, he believes she is remembering the room as it was when they first kissed. “These allusions were made in a sort of code, which only they could understand, and to anyone else the phrases would seem ordinary and without special meaning.”
• But you better get the code right, and a lot of people don’t.
• Klara makes all her plans while in her schoolgirl bed. She’s still a child.
• István Tisza supports the dual monarchy of Austria and Hungary. He was prime minister twice (and is at the time of this book but he’s about to lose). All of these books pretty much take place in the years when he was not prime minister.
• Tivadar Mihalyi spoke in the House for minorities in Hungary but nobody seems very interested. Ethnic division will eventually be a problem. The Croatians will be the biggest problem.
• “His black and white suit in contrast to the red of the benches” (of the House). Laszlo sits on poison green cushions and Balint sits on blood red benches.
• The world is falling apart but they only have their noses up their own asses in Hungary.
• Princess Agnes Kollonich still uses a perfect horse drawn carriage (equipage) because anyone with money can buy a car but only people who know how to do it can manage a perfect two horse carriage. Also why hurry?
• du haut en bas (“from on high to low”). So much effort to climb the social ladder and Klara has ruined the princesses chance.
• Unlike the gentleman with the monocle who played cards and spoke volumes just by dropping his monocle from his eye, his effortlesness is juxtaposed with view hard Agnes tries and thus fails. They tease her, get her Hungarian name wrong, day that bears only live where she came from. Bear = social outcast and crass
• He uses the language of warfare here: (Agnes) “swept out of the room like a battleship in full sail”, (Klara) “[stuck] to her guns”. Previously the clip clop of the horse was like a hammer nailing shut a coffin.
• I love that we don’t have to be told that everyone knows what is going on. Agnes and her father have heard all the gossip because that’s the way it is in society. I also like how I feel a little indignant about the accusation her Aunt makes when she says Laszlo is really in love with the singer Fanny. We invite he isn’t but the gossip days so, and the gossip is not from spite but jealously at his luck to be with such a crowd.
• It’s amazing anything ever for done in Hungary because they are all at balls and tie races and society dinners. No time to actually take care of their own country and all the problems brewing there (minorities).
• A Hungarian Jukker is a light Carriage
• Everyone favorite horse is ‘Patience’, but Klara won’t say who she is betting on. Patience is the sure thing; and that’s what she had been counting on with Laszlo and jet coming of age. But now… she can’t be patient, she had to fight and she’ll lose because she is naive.
• She makes him promise to never gamble again, then she gives him money to bet on a horse, he makes a bet and chooses 9 because it’s a lucky number in cards.
• “Politicians with party ties would shy away from him if he ever tried to discuss seriously what they had really thought.” Nothing changes. “A man who tried to see every side of a problem, who bent over backwards to take a fair and equitable view, was a suspect animal in the world of politics.”
• Géza Fejérváry real general and was prime minister from 1905 to 1906. Stephan Burián von Rajecz was actually finance minister, too. Wikipedia has great pictures of them both
• The colors of history, even to this day you can see the blood red on the uniform of Franz Ferdinand. Everything is colorful.
• The minorities are struggling, the press plays up the importance of society ladies in the national struggle, they all tow the party line with no originality, a blonde bites into a strawberry with get snow white teeth as she compliments the press. Sad.
• The poor maidservant holding Klara’s dress as she’s kicked out having gotten pregnant by the Butler. So much goes on behind the scenes.
• Need to look up how much 1000 crowns is worth in Hungary in 1904/05 : As Laszlo gave that poor girl a 1000K note, I was curious to figure out how much money that would be in today’s terms: turns out it’s actually about $1000 with about the same spending power. I used the 1905 edition of the “Austria-Hungary:Including Dalmatia and Bosnia; Handbook for Travellers” and looked at what it cost for a meal and basic fare lists at 3-8K: about the same as a fast food meal today. http://www.questia.com/read/100089084/austria-hungary-including-dalmatia-and-bosnia-handbook on page xvii in the introduction.
• He had a momentary epiphany when he thinks about how hard it must be to be poor then gets in his hired carriage that waits for him all day and later drinks an entire bottle of champagne to make himself happy.
• How unfair that the girl loses everything and he wins 10000 crowns playing cards.
• Balint had walked home in the fresh snow in dancing shoes when he kissed Adrienne’s palm, Laszlo walks home in thin, splitting evening shoes s broken man.
• Ch 5, a week later is the party where we learn Klara has been engaged to another of Fanny’s lovers. He then jumps back a few days to tell how this was arranged, jump back to the party where we meet up with Laszlo but with Fanny as the narrator’s focus, then we jump back to learn how he learned of the engagement to the idiot, dull Warday.
• “nothing is more difficult than to write what one does not know how to say “
• this back and forth of time works in even more minute detail when, for example, Fanny notices the artificial flower arrangement and we get some info on how the owners never refreshed them and they were all dusty because they were only kept on semi darkness on the hall, then we see Laszlo’s reaction to these flowers and he noticed they were fake and he makes a bitter comment about them. Always back and forth.
• “the purple darkness of desire”
• He can really write a woman character. Fanny is a marvel and I doubt a woman could have written her better.
• His description of the Abady castle is quite beautiful and must be based on the Bamffy family castle.
• “Outside a nightingale sang in almost crazed ecstasy.” This after the description of the castle, the problems with Azbej, arrival in a rainstorm, then a beautiful morning. Peace – chaos – troubled cleansing – peace again. This is the pattern.
• Mountains are described as floating and distances vapor into the air, borders of distance uncertain, only clear what is close at hand. The castle is permanent; the horizon blurred and faint. “… the distances did not seem real and stable and fixed.”
• The old castle gateway was too small for the large 18th century castle and when Count Denes Abady tried to widen it, it weakened and had to be torn down. The old can’t keep up with the new and is destroyed.
• It’s telling that when he was a kid playing cowboys and Indians he would be the Indian shooting arrows at the hated paleface. I also like the memory of his learning to ride and always falling off or on a horse that kept stopping short.
• The oldest tree, a poplar, had a great side branch fall in a storm but it still “covered in sticky buds about to burst into leaf.” Hard to kill the past.
• The further he goes on into the park the more primal and overgrown it gets until he’s nearly in a swamp. He looked for bit couldn’t find the ford because it had washed away
• Adrienne keeps appearing like a ghost

• Picture is of a Kirgiz cap that Miklos Absolon, Pal Uzdy’s uncle (his mother’s brother) wears when we meet him during by by political turmoil.
• I love that his mother knows that when Balint had been younger he used to ford the river to meet Dinora and that’s why Balint had been thinking of Dinora in his walk. We learn from him he had used this ford on the ‘darkest of moonless nights’ but not all the detail, we only learn what he thinks. I like this was kept a secret from us and we learn it from the person whom it was supposed to be kept most secret.
• We get to see Adrienne’s and Balint’s recent past through the eyes of the ‘upper-servant network’ : the skating at midnight, the inappropriate dancing, walks in the cemetery, sitting on the floor in the dark like a gypsy. Yet the rich don’t realize they are being watched and judged by their own servants. And the servants have quite interesting lives in this book, too.
• Wonderful touch about his clothes having been smeared with white limewash powder when he climbed into Dinora’s window.
• Mureș River is the river he watched as he led good horse and a man in town clothes seen in silhouette walked wearily along too
• Andras Jopal, the crazy teacher who tried to build an airplane is the weary man! Minya Gal, the old man had since died. And the crazy inventor apologizes and then leaves without, again, hearing out what Balint might suggest. He gets the violin, however.
• The old, poor, decrepit revolutionary knight Balazs Borcsey believes the emperor Franz Joseph should be removed from power because he had hung fellow revolutionaries and not shot them. Might have saved some trouble, too
• “It only needs a word from your lordship. ” is what all the petitioners say and probably believe being easy. Good insight from Banffy.
• He wondered if maybe Dinora in her white dress was sitting on the patio behind the foliage up above the road when he rode past to see Adrienne’s parents instead. Lovely image of her just out of sight
• Balint notices that the butler, Uzdy’s butler, had such powerful muscles under his livery
• Up to this point everyone has preferred English this and English that, but Uzdy prefers American fast horses (trotters) and even his mother, Clemence Absolon, is dressed simply in a gray dress with white collar almost like a puritan (and about as approachable)
• Balint’s and Clemence’s conversation was not interesting to either to them but they kept it up anyway.
• The Uzdy house has a totally unexpected wing with bars on the lower windows and in a totally different style than the rest of the house. Like insanity making its presence known
• Tanagra figurine are beautiful Greek figures that were made in a very rural part of Greece and not in the center of Greek world. Artistic oddity.
• Like the time in the cemetery they both walk up a steep path, this time through a forest that sits an old abandoned fortress, Almas fortress.
• Uzdy is mad and dangerous. He’s got to be jealous with all his wife’s lovers in his own home. He takes them clay shooting and is mad with energy, and did he give Balint a mocking glance? What’s being communicated here? Everyone speaks their own language
• Just as Prince Andrei in War and Peace looks out the window while the young Natasha is heard overhead and he admires the natural beauty of everything and is at peace, Balint’s view is half blocked by the mad addition and the landscape has “a vapoury, ghostly iridescence that seemed fraught with forebodings of a tragic destiny.”
• Watching the light proceed behind each bared window as Uzdy goes to rape his own wife. Chilling. Like a secret religious procession of torture.
• It’s now the 18th of June, but 1905 and Géza Fejérváry is elected prime minister of the kingdom of Hungary. Uzdy raping his own wife and the Hungarian Constitutional Crisis of 1903–1907 where emperor Franz-Joseph puts those he wants in power are thematically related.
• “They, too, were largely composed of university profrssors for in Kolozsvar, as almost everywhere else, the seat of learning also the seat of political strife.”
• We learned earlier that even tossing out one political slogan of rhetoric can cause all sorts of problems and misunderstandings, so who knows the problems they will arise as Dr. Korosi does nothing but speak in these terms Rio rile up the youthful anger. Nothing will be solved like this.
• Lajos Kossuth : “Father of Hungarian Democracy, Hungarian Statesman, Freedom Fighter”
• They talk about how the Russians are finished after losing to the Japanese… so much they were wrong about all in the name of nationalism
• man can not know : “mann kann ja nicht wissen” from German
• From political turmoil spilling out onto the street where Janko Cseresznyes (Cherrytree) who had worked with Azbej to get Balint elected whips up the crowd we next get Baron Egon Wickwitz in the carriage and we learn how he’s still spiraling out of financial control. We waltz about orbiting everyone at different times.
• Darabont means bodyguard or lackey in the transylvania region (only)
• Miklos Absolon says he had brilliant adventures in Asia, specifically Tibet, but because he never wrote them down to publish his stories then nobody believed his stories of adventure.
• Lizinka Sarmasaghy : I don’t remember her. She is Balint’s aunt apparently. She makes him go with her to meet his cousin Tamas Laczok, a railway engineer, who tells Lizinka that he would never help her because she gossips about him.
• “The only thing that gives us any moral right to the fortunes that we inherit is a sence of duty.”
• Ahnenstolz = pride of one’s origin, pride of one’s ancestors.
• But herein lies the cultural issue : why should they get to continue getting to run the affairs of the people of the classes under them. Why should who your dead father be make any difference. And besides, what real consequences await someone who does not have a sence of duty to their inheritance? It’s an unfair system that Balint defends and is cause of ethnic trouble and division. People want to control their own destiny, not let a distant dead relative do it for them.
• “Somehow conversation did not come easy to them; for both of them were thinking of other things.”
• Members of the same family are of different religions, the servants are also divided. Fracturing.
• “en froid” is ‘cold’ in French. Her mother in law refuses to speak to God because God let her husband go mad and die.
• Banffy has a gift for not only describing a scene but then narrowing in on just a few details that also frame the whole image : the small child holding the apple surrounded by the scent of sawdust, or Adrienne’s face framed by dark curls, her eyes glowing like gems, all barely visible in the darkness and seeming to float in space as her entire body, unattainable to Balint, is hidden by the bedcovers.
• Part 5 began at his beautiful family castle and ends at the mad Uzdy estate. At his home “Outside a nightingale sang in almost crazed ecstasy”, at her estate “Baliant’s mind was filled with disturbing erotic fantasies.”
• Part 6, “… thousands upon thousands of silent men in dark shabby clothes, moving relentlessly in rows of eight which took up the entire street. It was quiet Ave peaceful and inexpressibly sinister…”
• loc 9005, my God that’s beautiful. Image search Margit Rakpart
• While Fanny, the city, the whole world was alive with passion, Laszlo is depressed and distant. He is the unaffected class of the well to do too wrapped up in himself to worry or care beyond his nose.
• The rowdiness of the men in society, their tempers and vulgarity, it does speak to why the political parties act so childish with their tantrums and throwing eggs and such. We get a keen insight into a ruling class with its head so far up its own ass that it is blind to any important national issue or even what their servants do behind their backs in their own Estates. This was the end result of gentleman rule : ignorance , decadence, silliness, apathy, and it all caused so many terrible problems that ended with the causing of ww1.
• “No. I can’t say I truly love you.” This whole affair is interesting. Laszlo is always pretty successful when he is detached, at cards and with Fanny. And she really falls for this desperate man who is totally adrift, she gives up her most prized possession, that which defines her all to pay gambling debts for hin. It’s all a waste and none of them are really good people in behavior but are good in a way, too. Decadence.
• The town of Banffy-Hunyad is the town Huedin.
• Mr Simo, the notary, is a fraud. So much goes on behind the back of the ‘gentlefolk’, they’ve lost all control.
• Zsukuczo is the old peasant who leads Balint into the forest along a path on he seemed to know in the thick forest, but Balint did not shoot the doe and her fawns. How Zsukuczo knew this was the spot, who knows, probably a trick, but the chanting was a nice touch. The peasants are far more knowledgeable than their masters.
• The peasant girls who serve him poached food and then the one who sleeps with him, quite a forest fantasy. I wonder how common this sort of thing was? I love the image of just her bare arms reaching out from the tent to embrace him from behind and pull him back into her.
• La noptye = night. They will ‘solve’ their problems on ‘one night’, meaning violence.
• So much goes on that Balint knows nothing about. He, like Laszlo, is in a way detached, but unlike Laszlo, he does care, he’s just ignorant. He does love where Laszlo does not.
• They send along a man named Cselmnyik, Tiny, and Turturika, Little Dove, because he’s big. Intimidate the man whose help they need?
• They think Balint is capable of doing anything, even getting their debts cleared at a lower payment, but he can’t and neither side really understands the other as usual.

• Picture is of Portofino, Italy where Balint and his mother go for her health. Meanwhile it is snowing back home and the peasants have murdered the money lender.
• Pantyilimon is the name he kept overhearing his first night on the mountain. The peasants hate this moneylender because of the huge amount of interest owed back. Balint meets him but can’t make an agreement. He has no idea what he’s getting into. There is no way to know a foreign culture even one in your own backyard. This is indicative of the whole region at the time (and even today)
• Timisan, the Romanian lawyer, has unique insight. The armed medieval Knights who battled in glory when they took over Hungary and established their noble estates are no different than the middle class and the banks exploiting the peasants. Is murder better than forced poverty? All perspective and Balint is always naive and ignorant.
• Audi alteram partem (or audiatur et altera pars) is a Latin phrase that means “hear the other side too”, or “hear the alternative party too”.
• Balint learning Romanian to understand them better
• Banffy does such a good job of explaining all the complications in politics, especially local provincial politics. He surly knows how corruption works in the real world.
• He starts the section off by telling us about how they poison wolves, then we get ‘la noptye’ and the men who trudge through the snow to kill Pantyilimon. That then leafs seamlessly into the officers questioning the boy (always orbiting in then back out) and then ends ‘Nothing was ever discovered.’
• I like how he paints the men quietly waiting in the snow, resting on their staffs like shepherds (wolves, who are the wolves) until the prison works on the guard dogs. Then when questioned they are all silent still, ‘It was snowing. I was at home, asleep.’
• The peasants struggle in winter while the rich play in warm Italy.
• Adrienne and her sister, Judith, who was blocked from Wickwitz, talk and talk but she does not know for sure if Judith has forgiven or forgotten the ordeal. Nobody can communicate.
• Wickwitz (nitwit) has only himself to blame for his money trouble whereas the peasants have everyone else to blame. I do like that no family wants him near their daughters.
• They had to flee Parliament because the soldiers took it over by royal decree. Sad.
• The orbits come closer as Laszlo discovers Wickwitz’s financial secret with a loan officer and sees what scoundrel he too has become by being owned by a woman. Bit melodramatic by running out of the man’s office, however.
• I didn’t realize Wickwitz was not Hungarian but is Austrian and since Laszlo is Hungarian then this duel is seen as the oppressive regime trying to force the hands of the prison nobility, too. More ethnic tension and a good example of how complicated life gets.
• The duel we saw at the beginning was a farce, but this was serious.
• Ch 7 It is wonderfully absurd how Balint is sneaking in and out of Adrienne’s room every night just to talk to her
• “… A storm in a teacup it might be, but a tempest to those who lived in a teacup. ‘
• The lawyers do get everything. Azbej knew a winning loser when he met Laszlo and now he pretty much owns the property.
• When we finally get to read one of these letters (and to a larger degree hear what has been mostly summarized for us) Adrienne’s letter to Balint is all the more poignant and pathetic. There is no great answer here, just words that don’t express what she feels because she doesn’t know what she feels really.
• József Kristóffy wiki article, suffrage for Hungary
• Laszlo done in Budapest.
• The suit on the bed like the corpse of the life he once had.
• Italy is not so great now.
• Ch 10
• Sándor Wekerle prime minister starting 8 April 1906
• Mr Simo is the bad notary in the mountains and Daniel Kovacs is the good one who helped Balint with his plans in the mountains
• Adrienne is very much like Hungary and Balint’s ‘Love In Action’ book is probably something similar that Banffy might have written in real life.
• Funny that Balint calls in ‘Beauty In Action’ for Adrienne when she, in fact, never really moves.
• “Four weeks together… why should you care what comes after that? “
• The first place they go after making love is a church, Santa Maria dei Miracoli, Venice
• that lone boat far out with a lifeguard on it to rescue anyone who swims too far out and get a caught in overpowering currents in a dark sea.
• Festa del Redentore is the Venetian festival started in honor of the end of a terrible plague in 1576
• Chioggia, Italy, Provence of Venice
• Wow, that final image of Adrienne standing at the window as the white netting billows around her and covers her nakedness. Haunting image like a ghost. Like memory.
• ‘shroud ‘ is the last word. A Death word.

He starts the section off by telling us about how they poison wolves, then we get ‘la noptye’ and the men who trudge through the snow to kill Pantyilimon. That then leafs seamlessly into the officers questioning the boy (always orbiting in then back out) and then ends ‘Nothing was ever discovered.’

I like how he paints the men quietly waiting in the snow, resting on their staffs like shepherds.

Timisan, the Romanian lawyer, has unique insight. The armed medieval Knights who battled in glory when they took over Hungary and established their noble estates are no different than the middle class and the banks exploiting the peasants. Is murder better than forced poverty? All perspective and Balint is always naive and ignorant.

Banffy has a gift for not only describing a scene but then narrowing in on just a few details that also frame the whole image : the small child holding the apple surrounded by the scent of sawdust, or Adrienne’s face framed by dark curls, her eyes glowing like gems, all barely visible in the darkness and seeming to float in space as her entire body, unattainable to Balint, is hidden by the bedcovers.

Unlike Prince Andrei in War and Peace who looks out the window while the young Natasha is heard overhead and he admires the natural beauty of everything and is at peace, Balint’s view is half blocked by the mad addition and the landscape has “a vapoury, ghostly iridescence that seemed fraught with forebodings of a tragic destiny.”

I love that his mother knows that when Balint had been younger he used to ford the river to meet Dinora and that’s why Balint had been thinking of Dinora in his walk. We learn from him he had used this ford on the ‘darkest of moonless nights’ but not all the detail, we only learn what he thinks. I like this was kept a secret from us and we learn it from the person whom it was supposed to be kept most secret.

He ha a momentary epiphany when he thinks about how hard it must be to be poor then gets in his hired carriage that waits for him all day and later drinks an entire bottle of champagne.

Balint had walked home in the fresh snow in dancing shoes when he kissed Adrienne’s palm, Laszlo walks home in thin, splitting evening shows, a broken husk with no hope for love. I love how he contrasts these images.

Walls painted pale gray, sofas with sugar pink cushions, divans with poison green brocade and lemon yellow and black cushions. Fanny’s red gold hair like a flame, the use of word poison seems to foreshadow disaster? The table lit so that the black walls were not visible and so they were like an isolated island with darkness around them. He sits with his face to the world but his back to ‘untold terrors’

I love the guy with the monocle

Dominus vobiscum, “the Lord will be with you”, saying ‘banco’, gambling, is the most lordly thing a gentleman can do. What can be more lordly then saying banco?

The men gather together and gamble bit the women pick insipid spinsters so they won’t have any competition for their game.

Banffy’s understanding of how politics really works – at all levels – is impressive. Very intelligent person.

He describes the building as smelling like sawdust and then we get the image of a small child sitting in the floor and eating an apple. The mix of smell and visual is wonderful.

Does Adrienne’s lack of sexuality mirror the Empire, she looks great but is impotent; unable to love?

Her husband = devil

So much of what happens in Hungary is all based on misconception of what was said, such as the duel, and even Baliant’s throwaway remark, “God helps those who help themselves!”. The locals think he is trying to help himself – to their stuff.

“People at the top don’t realize, when they make even a quite simple order, that all of the burden falls in those on the lowest rung of the ladder.”

Banffy was quite a man

After Akos Miloth made everyone dance and is all out of breath, he sits down and the chapter ends with him saying “Do you remember, dear Aniko, how in our day…” leaving us hanging with that nostalgia after an old man had come to life and lead everyone in dancing like he used to. Brilliant.

The little orthodox church’s murals show the devils swallowing up sinners, all Hungarian, while all the saved are Romanian The sick boy ask wrapped up outside the cold is an ominous image. Like some dying Hungarian sphinx, but next after crossing the rickety bridge, they come upon the waterfall which he describes as having an unquenchable will to live.

I loved the off-hand comment about Alvinczy’s father being engrossed in reading Russian authors as Adrienne makes a sly remark about ‘nasty suspicions must freeze into nothing at ten below zero’. No doubt an allusion to Anna Karenina.

He can buy an election (well, have one bought behind his back) but when he sees the woman he loves skating with two strangers alone on a dark, frozen pond he can’t even bring himself to go over to her.

I liked the touch where Countess Miloth thought Balint came down because he was interested in one of her daughters while he only wanted news of Adrienne. Societal politics meets social politics like bad ice skaters.

I absolutely love the scene between Fanny and Laszlo at the piano. Her hand on his shoulder to help him keep the time, the two of them becoming one is so beautiful. And Banffy does not make this some silly romance, because Laszlo only wants to be with Klara, relives her on the shoot kissing that dead bird.

“After all, what foreigners understand Hungarian?”

That image of the curling smoke around the old general!

While the political situation is falling apart, most everyone is more concerned with what vintage wine they should choose with dinner.

Laszlo’s and Abady’s insecurity must be what makes them friends – neither feel as if they belong the the world they live in – outsiders each.

István Tisza = real political figure

The best Hungarian officer barely speaks Hungarian because he’s always with the Germans.

Were I younger I would have thought Adrienne was being a jerk, however, when you tell an unhappily married woman who is also your friend that you’ve loved her for a long time and then try to kiss her, her anger and accusations are not at all unjustified.

I love the image of the old draft horse scared that it all of a sudden is alone and free and so it runs back to its stall where its safe.

Everyone’s yelling!

The party scene was incredible, especially as Balint and Adrienne are on the balcony as the sun is about to come up and in that perfect moment the whole group of dancers come crashing out onto the patio, all stumbling around, and then disappear back in. There is a sadness, too. The fish with no bones, Uncle Dani with the books and passing out, the Valse Macabre nobody liked – “not all memories can be wished back”

It’s clear right from the beginning how splintered off everyone is politically speaking. Even families have become splintered as they married off and estates dwindled in size. Everyone must feel like they have to fight harder just to stay put. No wonder a small political group can be so disruptive.

Meanwhile there are tiny signs of neglect, barefoot and rude servants, dirty towels, millstones turned into tables.

The very leisurely pace of the writing draws you right into a long ago time of landed estates and horse drawn carriages. Everything feels like memories with a touch of the 20th century catching up.