I ran across Skylark in a post on one of my favorite book blogs, Literary Trashcan. (Okay, it’s really just a Tumblr in which this guy posts books, art, etc, that he finds interesting. I guess I think it’s interesting, too.) It’s a short Hungarian novel by Desző Kosztolányi, whose name I had to copy and paste and couldn’t pronounce if my life depended on it. But that’s neither here nor there.
It’s about two older parents and their 30ish-year-old spinster daughter, Skylark, who lives with them and takes care of them. They adore her and let her run the house. A family member invites them to his house in the country, and only Skylark goes, leaving her parents to fend for themselves for a week. At first, they miss Skylark terribly and appreciate all of the things she does for them. Then, eating out instead of eating Skylark’s cooking, they begin to rejoin their social circle at restaurants. They discover that life without Skylark isn’t so bad, after all, and that they can have lives of their own that aren’t totally overrun by her world.
Oh, I loved this book. It’s another one that I enjoyed the act of reading. The translation is beautiful and readable, and it’s a good book. I don’t really have much to say about it beyond that, but you should definitely check it out. It’s well worth your time.
