A Hungarian Turn

After my adventures in Beckett, I've moved on to Sándor Márai's The Rebels, which I grabbed at a library sale a few years back. As happens with a lot of such purchases, at best, I'll skim the back or inside cover, but don't pay all that much attention to it, lest any surprises be ruined by a publisher's teaser and/or summary. And so, I'm not sure whether or not having dutifully imbibed the rundown before cracking this thing open would have made any difference to my expectations-- but after tooling through the first chapter with a three-star (out of five) rating in my mind, I was pleasantly intrigued to find in chapter two that this little story has moved in an unexpected, and possibly disconcerting, direction. Unfortunately, the page-turning marathon of the night before left me too tired to keep going last night, so I'll have to put my curiosity on hold for another few hours.

Is it wrong to keep my fingers crossed for sinister developments? I don't really think they'll ensue from this group of pretty average, restless boys-- but Márai's creepy-crawly signature, featured here on a statue dedicated to him in Košice, gives me the (unfounded) hope that such things will unfold: