Satan tango

The 4 stars are because it is a damn fine piece of literature, but I cannot give it 5 because reading it was not fun at all. For how much fun, I say 1 star.
This book had not a single ray of sunshine, and it was one of the bleakest scenes I have ever walked in on before. The characters are misanthropic drunks that glare at you as you turn the pages, slowly because the sentences are so long pages. They sell their daughters and their friends and there was so much lonely disconnection that I had to grab my cat for comfort, which didn't work because a few pages later a tow-headed angel tortures and murders her fur person, accidentally, sort of...

The entire setting is a hopeless rotting bog. The landscape is one of endless rain on homes that are beyond disrepair. The muddy countryside is full of stagnant pools of filth navigated by confused, drunken assholes tottering towards their inglorious end or to wherever- who cares who knows. It doesn't have the energy of tragedy or despair really. Just people staring and waiting for some jerk to help them, but instead he ends up being a kind of satan or some government representative or representation.
The graphic descriptions of decay, sodden, muddy, everything rotting depressed me. And the never-ending sentences, strange transitions, sadly dreamy plot-movement, made it hard to follow, and I had to frequently reread after I drifted.
Yet it is clearly a fine book, intelligent, perceptive, unique. I read it to get a glimpse into Hungary, and it really cleared up why they suffer the health issues I have read about. All of the characters are deliberately vile, and the landscape bleak, so I would say that this book-trip to Hungary was a vacation better spent elsewhere, and much less fun than a visit I had to Budapest a few years back.
I read somewhere that it was a kind of Kafka, but Kafka was way more fun and less depressing. Which is not a thing I could say about a lot of books.