The three books that Kiš brought together in this Family Circus were published separately at different stages of his career. They share, however, impulse and theme. Precocious Sorrows can be described, paraphrasing Kiš himself, as the color notebook of an extraordinarily sensitive child, a collection of snapshots without chronological order in which childhood becomes a world. The latter would also serve to describe Garden, Ash, adding, perhaps, that this child's world, in which the real and imaginary planes overlap with perfect naturalness, is inscribed in historical circumstances that, without becoming explicit, determine in depth the tone. of evocation: the Second World War and the massacre of Jews and Serbs in Vojvodina at the hands of Hungarian fascism. Finally, The Hourglass is a polyphonic collage of enormous dramatic intensity. Here, the protagonist is the writer's father, a man of extraordinary personality, portrayed in the last phase of his life crisis. Moving and beautiful, the "novel of formation" that results from the meeting of these books in a trilogy, appears to us as one of the most relevant literary works of the 20th century.