János Holl

The war is over, but the Bodog family is starving. Varg's neighbor takes Mihai Bodog with him to do restoration work. They are well paid for this work and Mihai can finally please his wife Erji and their young son. When the workers are later hired to build a bridge, Bodog, a specialist bridge builder, cannot resist the challenge and is hired. But this time the workers are delayed in paying their wages, so their family is once again in need. Erji is forced to look for work...

Divided into four sections, "Song" is inspired by the Siberian and Finno-Ugric legends about Creation, in which the world begins with characters who are only half-human, one being half-bird, the other half-bear. The narrator delves into the origins of Hungarian culture, the Iranian and Turkish influences that impacted the society, and finally the story of Stephen, the emperor who brought Christianity to the country and shifted the capital west in an attempt to link with Europe.

A teenage boy, Bendegúz Regős, who has never succeeded at anything in his life and of whom the only thing people remember is: "I wish they had hanged you when you were two days old", drops out of school and is hired by his mother to be a cowherd with the help of a clutch. That's how he ends up with the harami-faced Bacter Szabo, who has to graze the cows by the railway. But even though Bendegúz is a well-meaning boy, he is usually "in trouble" by the time he has "finished his purpose...". The boy is subjected to a lot of humiliation, even if he has the sense to keep to himself. But his good humour never fails him. In the outskirts of Vecsés and Ferihegy, to make the cows fat, he is forced to graze in a forbidden area, which gets him a good beating from the peasants. But his life is made worse by his bacterial mother-in-law, the Stinky Witch, who turns even clean water into vinegar in his mouth. She is as flat as a flame from the front and as curvy as St. Gellert's Hill from the back.