Degrees of Twilight

The Degrees of Twilight is a love story that takes place in 1946, in the lost era of Hungarian history. This is the world of the disintegrating aristocracy, in which Gábor Unden begins to investigate a mysterious woman. The Olympic champion swimming coach is not only looking for the lady, but also for the first memory of her life, the so-called identification of his ancestral experience also keeps him in a fever. It is preoccupied with the issue of private memory when Hungary gradually loses its historical memory, when the streets are renamed, when the names of former characters in textbooks are erased. The protagonist of the novel, Gábor Unden, did not take part in the war. The imaginary front line runs between the mysterious woman’s apartment and the Margaret Island Sports Swimming Pool. The young man in Budapest, burning in the fever of reconstruction, is a kind of modern Don Quixote, for whom it is becoming increasingly clear that there is no secret around the woman, but Unden, who longs for heroism, will inadvertently cause great events. Meanwhile, Malek Sophie, who studied Christianity’s former rival religion, the Mithras cult, is drinking Coca-Cola thanks to an American aid consignment, listening to Louis Jordan’s 1946 album The The Times tart.