Seven Dirty Days

Spanning a century of European history, from 1912 to 2011, and set in Budapest, Berlin, Paris, Moscow, and beyond, Péter Gárdos's novel Seven Dirty Days is an unrelentingly raw, btingly satirical, and yet nuanced account of gender relations, class relations, brutality, and compassion from libidinous days before World War I to a little told aspect of sexual violence amid Stalin's purges and one young fascist's disgust with himself; from salacious goings-on in a boys' high school in Budapest in the 1960s to a knife-edge train ride from Budapest in the early 2000s. In one episode, two Russian sisters who've had a spontaneous, rooftop orgy with a Hungarian college student in 1912 Berlin (the son of a distinguished surgeon back in Budapest who is also a deplorable cad) bid the young fellow good riddance forever; in another, a music teacher in the USSR whose daughter was brutalized by Stalin's chief henchman decades earlier exacts a quietly courageous, profoundly satisfying revenge. Elsewhere, a Jewish boy whose family suffered in the Holocaust is the only one among his classmates to recognize the pain on the face of a young woman in a decades-old "erotic" photograph his peers are delighting in. That tragic, misunderstood photograph is, in a sense, this remarkably inventive novel's central protagonist as, by 2014, we learn that the descendant of an early twentieth century cad is, unsurprisingly, bitter, poor, and homeless.