Sári

“If this book had been published when the author wrote it, several decades before Françoise Sagan, we would have had a Vojvodina Françoise Sagan,” one of our critics remarked.

Sári is Erzsébet Börcsök’s first novel. She wrote it at the age of twenty.

The novel unfolds in the years following World War I, when, after the great harvest of death, the desire to live surged with elemental force, and a new generation danced the Charleston amidst the ruins of a bygone world. This generation is somewhat frivolous, somewhat cynical, but purposeful and determined when necessary, and Sári, the eighteen-year-old heroine of the novel, belongs to it. The setting is the rapidly developing city of Timișoara, on the banks of the Bega, which in its own way reflects every tremor of contemporary Europe, the new perceptions, new ideals, new customs, and the phenomena accompanying economic boom and crisis. Erzsébet Börcsök’s book belongs to the category of entertaining novels, but it is not an empty, entertaining read. It has a message; it possesses its own human value.

The reader receives the book in the year of the author’s death – a tragic meeting of the beginning of a career and the end of a life.