Embers by Sándor Márai Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Embers
Book Review: The best book I've read in a long time
Summary: 5 Stars
Simply fantastic. The way the author describes the ambiance and the tension is amazing. I coulnd't put it down !!! It's short but at the same time so rich.
I greatly reccomend it.
Book Review: Themes and Variations
Summary: 4 Stars
Embers hearkens back to the time when great themes were conspicuously pondered in the context of fiction. Today, its absence of self-referential irony would appear fatal. Still, the novel itself is suffused with a Weltschmerz that approximates irony. The comparison to Thomas Mann is instructive here: Marai might be termed the Ironic Hungarian. Certainly, his tendency to speculate about meaning and every subtle variation therein links him to the great Central European tradition of fiction. His style is less bombastic than Mann's, however. The construction is spare and elegant and the language is stripped of rhetorical ornament. The novel functions best as an intellectual exercise, however, so anyone desiring fully developed characters, narrative flow, or crisis and catharsis might be disappointed.Book Review: What is the sense of life?
Summary: 5 Stars
Henrik, the general, and Konrad, the artist, are both 75 years old. On his castle in Hungary, Henrik has waited for 41 years for the only and closest friend of his youth, Konrad, to return. And now Konrad has arrived. The book gives us the dialog between the two men, starting with friendship, truth, loyalty and honesty. Then comes the split: there are truths that are not reality. Reality is that Konrad as a young man, was very poor and had to seek support from Henrik's family. One day, he suddenly leaves and now returns after 41 years to answer his friend's questions. The dialog now changes from friendship to passion, to envy, and finally to hate.What is the sense of life? The author describes in direct language how this sense can change - depending on truth and reality. He shows the fascinating bridge from friendship to hate. Henrik's truths are turned inside out. Instead of reality he now sees the truth.
I wonder whether the author, who travelled much and committed suicide at age 89, entered autobiographical notes into his narrative.
Book Review: Will later be called a Master
Summary: 5 Stars
Indeed a rediscovered genius as top-star reviewers in the Washington Post, NY Times, and NY Review of Books have proclaimed, as well as Knopf, who give a couple generous words about the author in this hardcover edition. Short enough you can re-read, and here lies part of its magic: that it can be re-read. For, as Barthes noted, it is in re-reading that the role of reading is enacted. A wonder to be mined - I just finished reading it and very well might do it again in the next couple days, if not later. To situate its ideas, it is centrally concerned with time and memory. With its obvious European pre-cursor of Proust there are some similarities and many differences, in both their ideas about time and memory as well as how the style and form they are encapsulated in. Other recurring themes are friendship, knowledge (both what it is and how it is attainted), alterity, and love. With the last of these, the book does engage in the triangulation theorized by Girard to be at the heart of the European novel's form, maybe because it so deftly concerns itself with many of the long standing great articulations of literaty themes. But this small academic fitting is but a mere aside to the laundry list of reasons why this novel will soon be in the pantheon of the European novel, and world literature in general. I eagerly await teaching this work in the future firmly within the lineage of literaty masters it stands: Dostoevksy, Flaubert, Proust, Mann... and, as we see now, Marai. Thank you Knopf, and please bring more.
Please read this novel and see why I could ever spout such ridiculous things so quickly.
Book Review: sometimes you can judge a book by its cover
Summary: 3 Stars
The best thing about this book, at least the edition of it I read, was it's evocative cover. In fact, the romantic tones of Cabanel's "Portrait of Countess de Keller" that grace the cover, should have been clue, or warning, enough that what follows inside is hardly the masterly output of a "demigod" of writing such as Thomas Mann and Kafka, to whom Sandor Marai was compared to by "Die Zeit."Save for a couple of passages that managed to convey larger themes -- such as sacrifice for one's children, duty to one's country or heritage, the nature of Platonic love among friends, and the entropy of old age -- in a restrained style, the book was ablaze in the heat of overwrought prose that obscured the development of any real character. I couldn't care a fig for any of the characters in this piece, all of whom would have been very much at home in a Harlequim Romance, had they spoken in simpler sentences.
Every cliché of the romantic glory of the Austro-Hungarian Empire is alluded to in this book: from Vienna being the center of the universe to a grand vision of the hunt as some universal force, to the Arabs as noble savages, to male friendship as love among the Gods, to the faithful old toothless peasant nurse ... well, you get the picture. That this book sheds light in a new way on an era that was, as some critics would have it, must be an illusion of the bright embers of description of places that shine with calirty in the ash heap of all those clichés about human emotions.
Had I not spent some time in the Carpathian Mountains as a child, had I not had a nurse (or two) from a village, had I not have heard about the wonders of the Vienna that once was, I would tend to get a bit warm with nostalgia myself reading this book. I, too, would imagine that everyone in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, from wet nurse to Officer of the Guards, suffered from major delusions, and that no one, not even an artist, could think beyond the turreted bastions of his or her illusions. All this may well be true; but it certainly doesn't allow for character development, nor does it make for an engaging read.
In the author's defense and to be fair, this book was originally published in 1942 in Budapest, and its author, who was forced to flee Hungary in 1948, committed suicide in San Diego in 1989. For all I know, this Knopf edition was translated from the German, which would explain some of the baroque prose, but not the lack of any character development. I can only speculate that the work Marai produced after he left Hungary might be more germane to the theme of loss.