Akvárium

In this novel everyone is an orphan. The little girl adopted at the end of the 1940s, her foster parents, her own child, her husband and all their relatives and acquaintances, without exception, regard the lack of love as the accepted and only possible way to live. They scrape out their lives on a dilapidated, crumbling tenement gallery that smells of vegetable stew, within arm's reach of poverty and light years from what they think of as a normal life. Yet now and then their suppressed feelings and rages break out, and these eruptions become turning points. This oppressive, narrow but transparent world is the aquarium itself. The book mixes naturalism, irony and black humour in a period of the Hungarian past that is hard to come to terms with.

AI-generated summary

About the book

Form

Novel

Length

322 pages in the original

Genres

Family, Historical (assigned by AI)

Set in

Hungary

First published

2013 by Magvető

Author's age

46 when first published

ISBN

9789631430936 (original)