Németh László’s most famous novel, Revulsion, according to the author himself, “grew out of a single gesture: two spouses were sitting beside each other, and one was comfortably and contentedly fussing with the other, the nobler one.”

The situation itself—and the barbarity of the word “fussing”—makes it clear why marriage becomes a “nauseating trap” for the novel’s protagonist, Kárász Nelli. The woman being “fussed with” longs for a fruitful and purposeful solitude; she is a woman who rationally scrutinises everything she does. The man doing the “fussing,” Takaró Sándor, who has taken her as his wife, is driven by instinct and understands nothing of the consequences of his constant advances—or, as he himself calls them, the “playfulness” he demands every night. Of something the other person profoundly does not want. Something she instinctively resists. Until that resistance turns into tragedy.