European Reading Challenge #17

I read this for the 2024 European Reading Challenge.

Embers - Sándor Márai

A proud people, tense, guilty and melancholy. But gifted, romantic and passionate. No, not the Poles. Not this time, anyway. Today we are talking about the Hungarians.

Sándor Márai’s Embers (A Gyertyák Csonkig Égnek, translated by Carol Brown Janeway), released in Hungary in 1942, was published by Vintage to wide critical and popular acclaim in 2001. The main characters are two old friends meeting for the first time in 41 years for a long-delayed showdown. Against reader expectations, the topic of their discussion only partially involves betrayal with a woman. The main subject is male friendships and its obligations.

The secondary subject is old age and in its train the inevitable passing of old values and once burning passions. On one hand, now that I am doing the “middle age in the rear view mirror” thing myself, I’m sadly certain that this theatrical, musty seriousness about getting old is simply impossible for me to take seriously. Think Bergman's ponderous movies like the pompous Seventh Seal. On the other hand even though a shallow American, I didn't feel the world created by the book was fake. There really must be people who live with so much vanity disguised as pride, so much barely concealed conceit about fluff. It must be horrible to live like this, blind and deaf to their own miseries.

This translation is extremely readable. The language is plain without being in the manner of a mock epic. For all the remembering and telling, instead of showing, it is quite the page turner. Count on a Hungarian writer to explore existential themes and the distinction between truth and facts, as if prescient of the awful experience of Hungary in WWII.

This novel would interest people into Hungary, the values of Habsburg empire, or looking to widen their literary horizons.