Embers by Sándor Márai Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Embers
Book Review: On how a passion can make you live more than expected.
Summary: 4 Stars
Embers seemed to me an excellent brief novel on passions (friendship, betrayal,love and revenge, mainly). The first few chapters are told by an impersonal narrator that sets the infromation needed to start knowing the two main characters: The General and his friend Konrad. After that, most of the story is told by the General himself as a dialogue with Konrad, 41 years after the main events happened.You will find a lot of ideas interwinged in the General's words but two are central, from my perspective: first, that a passion can make you live more that you would expect; the General lives those 41 years with only one purpose on his mind: to have a last meeting with Konrad, and it can be infered that the same happens to Konrad. Second, that there is a true beyond the facts when you are dealing with human behaviour, motifs, and intentions. To discover that "deeper" true is difficult but attainable. It is also worthwhile.
Although perhaps the novel deals more with ideas than with events or facts it will not diminish its emotional strenght and it will remain a very moving story. Excellent.
Book Review: Simple elegance
Summary: 5 Stars
The beauty of the book is its simple elegance. The story revolves around the reunion of two friends after 41 years. How and why they separated is the backdrop for an exposition on betrayal and the one who is betrayed. Even though the book is translated, the flavor and beauty of the narration are preserved.Embers was actually a book recommended to me by my colleague at work. Interestingly, it turned out to be edited by a colleague of my sister's at Knopf. I would have to say that this book ranks as one of my all-time best books and will probably place as one of the best books that I've read for 2001.
Book Review: Some thoughts upon reading "Embers"
Summary: 5 Stars
One knows when one reads a great contemporary book - after completing the first reading, one goes back to page one and immediately rereads it. Thus one picks up all the nuances and innuendos embedded in the books structure and thoughts that were missed in the first reading. In my lifetime, there has been only two books where this has occurred. One was "The Plague" by Camus and the other was Saramago's "Blindness". (I am tempted to add Thomas Mann's books but they were so exhausting in reading that one needs a break before the next crack at it.)I now add "Embers" by Sándor Márai to these other two aforementioned great books. A once in a lifetime experience.
To begin with, Márai is Hungarian - that country whose language is completely different from other European languages except Finnish. There are just a few such professional translators, so we have to exist with a translation of a translation - from Hungarian to German to English. Though one trusts the translation has lost nothing in the process, one always has nagging doubts, especially it comes to nuances and innuendos. This may account for the 13 years that have gone by since his suicide before we have seen any work of his in English. That may also account for the fact that he is a writer who should have received the Noble Prize but did not.
The story line is most simple. ...It has been said, this book was just one part of what was to be a huge study in family relationships over generations covering the two world wars and several governmental upheavals both of which play in the background of this novel. The reader can only put down this slight volume wondering "what's next?" Were there to be two more volumes presenting two other viewpoints on the same subject by the other two players in this betrayal? Or is this just one segment of generations to come, influence by this event. Perhaps this very event is the cumulation of a multitude of preceding events. One cannot help but speculate. Speculate and hope that there are more writings of this ingenious writer that have yet to be translated. Let us hope so. In the meantime we will live with our own imaginations working overtime with what Márai has stimulated us to think about.
This is a novel not only about existentialism in its very essenc and plot but is existential in and of itself...
Book Review: Strings, percussion and celesta
Summary: 5 Stars
Like some of Bartok's best music, Marai takes us on a mind trip. The reader is forced to share a sense of an unlucky fate, in which a man's life is permanently changed both because of and despite his personal senses of duty, friendship, fidelity and honor. Years of his life are put on hold because of a suspected act of betrayal on the parts of both his wife and a close friend, until the truth is finally revealed. Yet this is *not* the story, because by the time the truth is made evident, it no longer matters. This is not about what was, or even what is. It's about what might have been. Very fatalistically Hungarian. Read it in the evening with a glass of port.Book Review: Strong dialogue and character
Summary: 5 Stars
Set in a castle in Hungary, this tells of a forty-year reunion between old friends, of the stories and evasions which emerge, and of a stag hunt of the past whose repercussions still have the power to affect their future. Strong dialogue and character in this moving novel.