In these second and third volumes the story of Lazslo Gyeroffy — the charismatic, dissipated foil to authorial stand-in and all-round stand-up guy Balint Abady — recedes into the background as its subject hits rock bottom and stays there, leaving the narrative unbalanced and at times approaching autofiction. Still though, it's autofiction of the highest quality. The parallel stories of Balint's star-crossed relationship with Adrienne "married to a madman" Miloth, and the Hungarian and broader European political vortex spiralling towards the Great War, are interleaved with immense assurance, and punctuated with scenes of Transylvanian life and landscape that leap off the page. Bánffy's first-hand experience gives the political chapters an assurance and verisimilitude that carry along even a reader as unversed in early twentieth century Austro-Hungarian parliamentary proceedings as me, and it also gives him a feel for human nature and human folly that makes the whole novel feel extraordinarily grown-up. The set-pieces — the society events and especially the domestic politicking — come to seem increasingly bathetic as the Hungarians waltz gaily and blindly into the coming cataclysm. The insanity is allegorised in vignettes like when the secretary of the anti-duelling league has to hide his duelling injuries from its patron, or when Balint visits a reclusive aristocrat holed up in his manor with maps and travel narratives, sailing the world in his imagination. The Trilogy is a bona fide classic, and the English translation by Patrick Thursfield and the author's daughter Katalin Bánffy-Jelen is superb: fluent, consistent and tonally congruent with the dates of the original, i.e. it feels like it was written by a Hungarian Count in the 30's.