Jaguar

Jenő Heltai (1871-1957) - journalist, poet, story writer, dramatist and novelist - is an entertainer through and through, and the lasting popularity of his work derives from its delicate humour. Flippant, gently mocking, sentimental, often displaying a Gallic lightness of touch, Heltai has been compared to Somerset Maugham, and like him makes these qualities a thin veil for a compassionate human warmth. 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 eponymous hero - titled but impoverished - has come to journalism after a career of kaleidoscopic variety, and his personality makes him the natural leader of his colleagues in the quest for the regular scoops which he has rashly promised the proprietor. That the level and manner of his success should astound is only to be expected!