Seven Dirty Days

Spanning a century of European history and locales including Budapest, Berlin, Paris, and Moscow, Seven Dirty Days follows the fate of a mysterious photograph that reveals—in seven sordid chapters—shocking accounts of the treatment of women and the treatment of Jews. A filmmaker's powerfully cinematic narrative, it also gives voice to women in control of their fates, and, throughout, gives us glimmers of hope for a better future.

With relentless narrative force punctuated by an exhilarating comic touch, Péter Gárdos weaves a story as absorbing, suspenseful, and inventive as it is sweeping in the century of Central and Eastern European history it covers; a story that takes the reader in stunningly credible detail from pre-World War I Budapest and Berlin to 1930s Moscow and Paris, post-World War II provincial Kazakhstan; and then back again to Budapest, first in the communist era and, finally, in the twenty-first century, where, on board an international express train en route to Munich, no less, things come full circle in a scene that comes within a hair’s breadth of murder.

This story of social conflict, political upheaval, oppressor/oppressed (e.g., man/woman, fascist/Jew), betrayal, and so much more is rendered with great sensitivity even amid its unsettling depictions of sexual depravity and sexual violence. Its transnational reckoning with a century of history is as powerful as any that has come out of Europe in recent years; the almost playful prose brings a story that in another writer’s hands might simply be depressing fully to life.