Sandor Marai: Embers

The publishing history of the Sandor Marai's Hungarian novel Embers reads like a plot of another novel. First published in 1942 Budapest, it remained largely obscure throughout its author's life. Because of his anti-fascism and later antipathy towards communism, he had to live his entire life in exile, first in Italy and then in America where he finally committed suicide in 1989, ironically just before the collapse of Soviet Union and the tearing down of the Iron curtain. It was rediscovered in the late nineties and after being translated into French and German it became a bestseller in most of the Europe. This english version is surprisingly and indeed rather irritatingly translated not for the original Hungarian but from German. The last time I had a similar experience was with Stanislaw Lem's polish novel Solaris which was translated from French rather than its original language. It is surprising how even such high profile authors get such shoddy treatment from publishers.

Anyway, the novel itself is quite good, though to be honest it left me slightly underwhelmed in the end. The structure of the novel is quite simple. A General who is now in his mid-seventies, living alone in a castle in the foothills of carpathian mountains, waits for a friend Konrad who is coming to him after a gap of fourty one years. Konrad disappeared one day, "the day of the hunt", mysteriously, without annoucing or telling anybody. The dinner scene between the two friends is just a pretext for the general to deliver a long monologue about the things that have troubled him and things he has thought over in his solitude for the entire fourty one years. Reading it is like reading a suspense novel so I won't reveal the plot althogh it isn't hard to guess what could have happened between the two men and the General's wife. The way Marai withholds information and reveals details slowly makes it a very engrossing read. But overall it feels like too simple a device for storytelling. Granted the monologue is full of wisdom and reading it will make you think about things like the conflict between duty and loyalty on the one hand and passion and desire on the other, or the ties that define masculine friendships, the ability of music to capture the unsayable or how difficult it is for people of different temperaments to be in a honest and lasting relationship and yet how the mysterious force of eros brings and keeps two "different" people together, how people take their emotional wounds to their graves (the original Hungarian title translates to "Candles burned till the end") and lots of things like that. But on a purely structural level the novel feels a little too simple and straightforward.

The general's monologue at places does sound like a tendentious and didactic speech but it will make sense if you take into account the fact that it is the moment that he has prepared for the last fourty one years, or so he claims. The prose style is good, though I have a feeling that a lot was lost in the translation because I could only feel the tone of emotional repression at few moments. It is not sustained throughout the novel and slacks and degenerats into blandness at a few places.

To end here is a quote from towards the end of the book:

"What do you think? Do you also believe that what gives our lives meaning is the passion that suddenly invades us heart, soul, and body, and burns in us forever, no matter what else happens in our lives? And that if we have experienced this much, then perhaps we haven't lived in vain? Is passion so deep and terrible and magnificent and inhuman? Is it indeed about desiring any one person, or is it about desiring desire itself? That is the question. Or perhaps, is it indeed about desiring a particular person, a single, mysterious other, once and for always, no matter whether that person is good or bad, and the intensity of our feelings bears no relation to that individual's qualities and behaviour? I would like an answer, if you can," he says, his voice louder and more imperious.

"Why do you ask me?" says the guest quiety, "when you know that the answer is yes."

The complete review page of the book links to more reviews. Most of them are very enthusiastic.