Be Faithful Unto Death
Be Faithful Unto Death
The moving story of Misi, a bright and sensitive schoolboy growing up in a long-established boarding school in the city of Debrecen in eastern Hungary, who is falsely accused of stealing a winning lottery ticket.
First published in 1921, the novel is brimming with vivid detail from the provincial life that Móricz knew so well and shot through with a sense of the tragic fate of a newly truncated Hungary. The universal quality of the experience captured here, as well as the author`s uncanny ability to rediscover for us precisely what it feels like to be that child, makes this portrait of the artist as a young boy not merely a Hungarian but a European classic.
"Be Faithful Until Death is a classic in Hungary; nearly every Hungarian has read it. A foreigner wanting to understand the Hungarian psyche would be well-advised to read it as well. The contemporary Hungarian attitude IS quintessentially distilled in this novel.
One of the finest depictions of of child`s coming of age that I have ever read. The book should not be taken as indicative of Hungarian mentality, but it does reflect the tragic tone of the Hungarian society at the time the book was written: just after World War One.