No Stopping Train

A young couple navigates poverty and revolution in postwar Hungary in this dense, difficult, poetic novel by the late Hungarian-born writer Plesko (The Last Bongo Sunset). Margit and Sandor marry in 1946 and settle in Budapest. Sandor, fresh from service in the war, makes money forging papers, while Margit, who lost her father in the conflict, and her mother soon after, works as a seamstress. Tearing at the fabric of their marriage is Erzs%C3%A9bet, a woman whom Sandor rescued from a concentration camp and with whom he carries on an affair. Plesko whisks readers through the first 10 years of the couple's marriage as the country hurdles toward the 1956 revolution. In snapshot-like chapters that shift perspective, as well as mental letters from Margit "composed" after the revolution breaks out, we watch as the characters' lives, already dreary to begin with, deteriorate. Sandor's forgery lands Margit in a gulag, and as the revolution nears, a string of betrayals leads to injury, heartbreak, and death. While the dialogue is sometimes awkwardly aphoristic, one ultimately comes away seduced by Plesko's prose. (Oct.)