Debts of Honor

by Mór Jókai

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Pages: 332

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About this book

Debts of Honor is a novel by Mór Jókai, translated from the Hungarian by Arthur B. Yolland, whose note, dated Budapest, 1898, says many of Jókai's countrymen consider it his masterpiece. The contents list chapters titled "The Journal of Desiderius," "My Right Honorable Uncle," "Fruits Prematurely Ripe," "The Secret Writings" and "Parole d'Honneur."

In one passage a narrator describes his father's coffin, brought into the village by night and carried on the shoulders of four retainers toward a garden, where a small round building with a gaudy iron door stands near a rivulet. In another, a girl listening to Lorand explain the sun's spectrum whispers, "Teach me to read," and Topándy asks what use that would be. In a third, a gypsy woman's basket holds a pig, and when a man named Kólya tears the pig out, a dollar rolls from its mouth.

About the author

Mór Jókai

Mór Jókai (1825-1904), also known as Maurus Jókai, was Hungary's most popular and prolific novelist and a leading voice of its Romantic era. A participant in the 1848 revolution, he went on to write more than a hundred novels celebrating Hungarian history, landscape, and national character.