You can keep all kinds of themes in the air as Orringer does: not for nothing is Andras an architect. That’s what you can do in a 700-page book: you can let your characters change, mature, make mistakes, redeem them. But life goes on, you know? People eat meals, laugh, write letters, fall in love, get beat up, lose their jobs. Antisemitism is already on the rise and the politics of Central Europe promise nothing good. Thus Orringer economically sets up most of the fundamental relationships in the novel, while also whetting the reader’s curiosity: who will receive the letter? Why the secrecy?Īndras goes off and begins learning how to be an architect, but it’s 1937. She entrusts him with a box for her nephew Joszef and a mysterious letter to mail secretly in Paris. A well-dressed woman recognizes him and summons him to visit her house the next day, before he gets on his train to France. The tale begins slowly, with young Andras Lévi at the opera in Budapest with his brother Tibor, the night before he departs for architecture school in Paris.
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