Lírai bolyongások / Lyrical Rambles

Jaguar (1914) is the tale of the meteoric rise and fall of an apocryphal newspaper. The artfully constructed plot is set in the bohemian milieu of an easy-going fin de siecle Budapest – where Heltai himself was a young journalist – in which the telephone exists, cars do not, much importance attaches to coffee-houses and journalists rise late and work till all hours.

The main historical events that are addressed are: the bloodless occupation of Buda, the seat of the Hungarian kings, in 1541, and the 1552 Siege of Eger (now in Northern Hungary) by the Turks, that forms the major topic of the novel.