Eyes Like the Sea

He was a painter, a poet, a novelist. She was the woman with eyes like the sea. From their first meeting, he loved her completely, but she was drawn to flashier men, to rogues and dandies, to the tenth draw from destiny's urn. He pursues politics while she follows her capricious heart. Yet across decades, she keeps returning to him, and he discovers the terrible truth: she loves him most of all, but cannot stop choosing those who will break hers. Winner of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences prize in 1890, this is a devastating portrait of love as devotion and love as wound. Jókai captures the particular agony of loving someone who sees you clearly but cannot choose you, of being the steady shore to another's restless tide. It is Hungarian Romanticism at its most lush and heartbroken, a novel about what it costs to love wisely when your heart insists on wandering.