It is 1900, give or take a few years. The Vajkays — call them Mother and Father — live in Sárszeg, a dead-end burg in the provincial heart of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Father retired some years ago to devote his days to genealogical research and quaint questions of heraldry. Mother keeps house. Both are utterly enthralled with their daughter, Skylark. Unintelligent, unimaginative, unattractive, and unmarried, Skylark cooks and sews for her parents and anchors the unremitting tedium of their lives.

Now Skylark is going away, for one week only, it’s true, but a week that yawns endlessly for her parents. What will they do? Before they know it, they are eating at restaurants, reconnecting with old friends, attending the theater. And this is just a prelude to Father’s night out at the Panther Club, about which the less said the better. Drunk, in the light of dawn Father surprises himself and Mother with his true, buried, unspeakable feelings about Skylark.

Then, Skylark is back. Is there a world beyond the daily grind and life's creeping disappointments? Kosztolányi’s crystalline prose, perfect comic timing, and profound human sympathy conjure up a tantalizing beauty that lies on the far side of the irredeemably ordinary. To that extent, is nothing less than a magical book.

Un autor consagrado, completamente integrado al medio burgués que tanto criticó en sus años estudiantiles, busca el perdido trato con Kornél Esti, su gran amigo de juventud. Al contrario de lo que le ha sucedido a nuestro escritor, Kornél Esti no ha triunfado, sigue siendo un bohemio, un iconoclasta y un rebelde. Y, también al contrario de lo que le ocurre a nuestro narrador, prefiere vivir a escribir; prefiere la experiencia a la escritura. Tales diferencias son la base del trato que se establece entre ambos amigos: uno vivirá y el otro escribirá lo que el primero le cuente.Las vivencias de Kornél Esti, que procuran al protagonista el conocimiento de la belleza y de la crueldad, de lo terrible y de lo banal, de la grandeza del hombre y de sus la miserias, están narradas en un tono grotesco, no exento en ocasiones de comicidad, que acentúa la profundidad de la vision que Dezsö Kosztolányi tenía del alma humana, y, a la vez, nos muestra la modernidad de la obra de este gran clásico de las letras húngaras del siglo XX.