TO ERR IS DIVINE

Bozai's English-language debut, a bestseller in Germany and Hungary, pokes wily, subversive fun at Communist backwardness, capitalist excesses, religious suggestibility and stubborn atheism alike. Anna Lévay, widowed young when her husband was killed in an uprising against Hungarian police, is now a penny-pinching schoolteacher approaching the end of middle age. Emerging from her bath one night, she discovers what appears to be a halo shining about her head. Anna's disbelief and attempts at indifference become funnier (and increasingly difficult to maintain) as miracles and wonders multiply around her: fish leap ashore when she passes by, joints mend themselves at her touch, water turns to wine. For the humble, pragmatic Anna, these unsolicited supernatural powers are puzzling and alarming—an affront to her highly developed sense of dignity. When a prominent doctor in the once-popular resort town begins to suspect that recent goings-on are related to Anna, he joins forces with the mayor to draw her into a cunning plan to revive the town's tourist trade and line their own pockets in the process. The novel gets off to a slow start, but Anna gradually grows into an engaging innocent whose crotchety scorn for the self-important avarice of the powers that be, whatever their political affiliations, is as dark and funny as it is consciousness-raising. (June)