LADIES DAY (ASSZONYSÁGOK DIJA)

Gyula Krúdy whom John Lukacs calls `the greatest prose writer of Hungary in the twentieth century` created a vast body of fiction and non-fiction that remains still largely undiscovered in European literature. Sándor Márai found his `literary power and greatness almost past comprehension. He knew and preserved an other Hungary that was more enigmatic, more humane, more frightening and paradoxical than the real one.` In Ladies Day the undertaker János Czifra finds himself at a wedding and then in a brothel where, via an encounter with his shadow self Dream, he witnesses a series of bizarre and sordid scenes. A young woman goes into labor alone and abandoned in a dog's den at the bottom of an air shaft. Her life story unfolds, including a nestled narrative of murderous love set amidst tableaus of Budapest in the early 1900's.