Memory and Desire

Embers 
by Sándor Márai


“No, the secret is that there's no reward and we have to endure our characters and our natures as best we can, because no amount of experience or insight is going to rectify our deficiencies, our self-regard, or our cupidity. We have to learn that our desires do not find any real echo in the world. We have to accept that the people we love do not love us, or not in the way we hope. We have to accept betrayal and disloyalty, and, hardest of all, that someone is finer than we are in character or intelligence.”  ― Sándor Márai, Embers


Sandor Marai has an uncanny ability to demonstrate his ideas through things that are not said. Embers is permeated with nostalgia for the past, a past that, as in Proust, cannot be recaptured. This book is excellent not just for how well it is written and how well it is structured, but for the author's ability to demonstrate his ideas through what is not said.  "My homeland no longer exists . . . Everything's come apart. My homeland was a feeling, and that feeling was mortally wounded. When that happens the only thing to do is to go away."(p 92) This is the statement of Konrad, the childhood friend of Henrik who is the protagonist of this amazing novel.

We are introduced to Henrik in the first line of the book, "In the morning, the old general spent considerable time in the wine cellars," where he is aging in his seventies just like a fine wine. With his aging come memories of a long life, of youthful friends, of love and betrayal. All this is narrated in a short novel of little more than two hundred pages. It is a story that depends more on feelings and of contrasts between Henrik and his former friend Konrad who is returning for one final confrontation. The contrasts include that of passion and reason, of the world with and without music, of the differing personalities of the south, where Konrad has spent much of his life and the north of Austria and Hungary where Henrik has remained.

Interlaced with their lives is the figure of Nini, a mother figure to Henrik, who is described as, "a power that surged through the house, the people in it, the walls, the objects, the way some invisible galvanic current animates Punch and the Policeman on the stage at the traveling puppet show. Sometimes people have the feeling that the house and its contents could, like ancient fabrics, fall apart at a touch and crumble to nothing if Nini were not there to hold them together with her strength."(p 11) Nini is always in the background, appearing in the first chapter and present in the last. But there is also Krisztina who would marry Henrik, but spend years estranged from her husband even as she does not leave their estate. The ghost of Krisztina hovers over Henrik throughout the novel as does the aura of death. The story is part mystery and these themes are part of the mystery along with the reason for the estrangement of Henrik and Konrad.

It is Henrik who enigmatically isolates himself, yet opens the house for one last elaborate meeting with Konrad, once his friend and now his nemesis. The world of the past no longer exists except in their memory. Some people have moved on, but the past must be revisited on one last evening. It is this evening that with a mere gesture Henrik throws Krisztina's diary, unopened, "into the embers of the fire," (p 204). This action symbolizes his life, his loves, his era. It is the feeling of this era which Marai is superb in capturing. It is the heavy weight of centuries of empire that is encapsulated in his simple brushstrokes. One could compare him to Mann or perhaps Proust in his ability to explore philosophy and memory and desire, but ultimately his is a unique voice that bears reading and rereading to explore the complex relationships and meanings that are hidden within his beautiful novel.

View all my reviews

Tuesday Intros: Embers by Sandor Marai

 
Every Tuesday Diane from Bibliophile By the Sea hosts First Chapter First Paragraph Tuesday Intros, where  participants share the first paragraph (or a few) of a book they are reading or thinking about reading soon.  Today's selection is from Embers Sandor Marai's beautiful and elegiac novel I am rereading for our First Sunday book group.





 

"In the morning, the old general spent a considerable time in the wine cellars with his winegrower inspecting two casks of wine that had begun to ferment.  He had gone there at first light, and it was past eleven o'clock before he had finished drawing off the wine and returned home.  Between the columns of the veranda, which exuded a musty smell from its damp flagstones, his gamekeeper was standing waiting for him, holding a letter."

Sandor Marai

"No, the secret is that there's no reward and we have to endure our characters and our natures as best we can, because no amount of experience or insight is going to rectify our deficiencies, our self-regard, or our cupidity. We have to learn that our desires do not find any real echo in the world. We have to accept that the people we love do not love us, or not in the way we hope. We have to accept betrayal and disloyalty, and, hardest of all, that someone is finer than we are in character or intelligence."   
—  Sándor Márai (Embers)


One of my favorite novelists in recent years is the Hungarian novelist Sándor Márai who was born on this day in 1900. Márai’s books have been reissued and become bestsellers recently, after having been nearly forgotten for decades. Fiercely anti-Nazi and anti-Communist, Márai fled Hungary in 1948 and refused to allow his work to be published there under any Communist regime. He eventually settled in San Diego, continued to write, and published forty-six books before his suicide in 1989. Perhaps because of Christopher Hampton’s 2006 play adaptation produced by Portobello Productions and starring Jeremy Irons, the best known of Márai’s novels to reappear is Embers. The story is a smoldering fireside chat in which two former friends recall the Vienna of Emperor Franz Joseph, an aristocratic-military world of high boots and brightly-lit ballrooms and deeper desires held at bay. Only brief excerpts from Márai’s actual memoirs have been translated to English as yet (by Tim Wilkinson in the Hungarian Quarterly) but they promise another bestseller. The journal entries from his last years are a riveting historical and personal document, ranging from his dying wife’s daybreak declaration of love to his target practice with his suicide revolver to his memories of his life-journey. The following is taken from his March 18, 1984 entry, Márai three weeks away from his eighty-fifth birthday:


A dinner in the Mikó utca apartment, 40 years ago today. Everything was, at that point, still in its place, two maids, the big apartment. The table setting as in the good old days: silver ware, china, everything just as it should be. Of the family members around the table, sharing in that supper on my name-day, my mother, Aunt Julie, brother-in-law Gyula, sister-in-law Tessie, and Alice Madách have all passed away. My brothers are still alive, so am I, and L. too, though only just. That night German Nazi troops occupied Budapest. Everything was dislocated- life, work, Hungary, the old order and disorder. A total break.
I was 44 and just recovering from a severe illness. Two weeks later came the move out to Leányfalu, into exile, with the dog and a maid. The bombardment of Budapest began, with our own house being hit by 36 shells and bombs on the last day of the siege; everything was destroyed. I left half my life there. Then came the second round, the roaming across continents. It was 40 years ago today that the self I was until then perished, and that other self who I am today took shape- and now even that is in the process of disintegration. (The Hungarian Quarterly)

One Must Also Be Hungarian 

by Adam Biro

The Hungarian national anthem is the only sad and desperate anthem in the world. It was written in the nineteenth century and even the communist regime kept it. Instead of the usual lyrics claiming "we are the best," "our fatherland is above all others," "we shall win against all," it states, "this nation has already suffered the price for the past and the future." (p xvii)


Perhaps one must also be Hungarian to truly understand Hungarian literature. Having read several books over the past eleven weeks from the pen of more than a half dozen different Hungarian authors whose work spans the era from the ebbing of the Austro-Hungarian empire at the end of the nineteenth century to the fall of Communism near the end of the twentieth century I cannot claim to have developed an understanding of the literature or the culture.  But I have developed an appreciation for their literature -- both fiction and memoir.  Adam Biro's own  memoir, One Must Also Be Hungarian, displaying his family and ancestors, and more poetically titled Les Ancetres d'Ulysse in the original French, is a memorable collection of portraits of his family. Each portrait within it is like a snapshot capturing features of personality and character, illuminated by memories and episodes from family history and the author's own experience. His use of family photographs enhances the personal nature of the story by providing images to set beside his elegant but simple prose.  While the elan and humor of his family is clearly delineated there remains an overarching melancholy tinged with sadness for those relatives whose lives were ended suddenly, sometimes due to the violence and hatred that swept Europe in the twentieth century. He shares the glories of Hungarians both within and outside of his family that permeate the zeitgeist of their existence. The stories of success as with Uncle Eugene Perlmuth and the tragic life of the artist, Uncle Jozsi, are just two of the portraits that moved me the most. Both the glories and the sadness are conflated to create an overall image that I found -- the humanity of the whole.


One Must Also Be Hungarian by Adam Biro. University of Chicago Press. 2006 (2002)


View all my reviews

An Extreme Life

Fatelessness 

by Imre Kertész

Nominally this is a story about a young boy who is sent to the Nazi concentration camps from his home in Budapest in the last year of World War II. Narrated in the first person by young Gyorgy Koves, the novel is the story of an outsider -- one who does not belong to any group or anyone even as he is brutally incarcerated and his life is severely restricted almost to the point of death.


Gyorgy is an outsider in several senses. The week before he leaves home his Father is sent away to a "labor camp". When Gyorgy arrives at the concentration camp to which he has been transported he has to claim to be sixteen when he was not, surviving by being one of a small number of youths among many older prisoners. He was not from a particularly religious family, and knew neither Yiddish nor Hebrew. So, while he wore the obligatory yellow star, fellow Jewish prisoners looked down on him because he only spoke Hungarian, again he was an outsider and felt as though he did not fit in, but took it all in stride with faith that things would work out. His narrative underscores the feeling of being an outsider by a focus on the his individual interaction with the camp with little mention of specific interpersonal connections. The one exception, his friend Bandi Citrom, is the only boy whose name we learn.


The author uses his young narrator's lack of knowledge about his surroundings to maintain a distance from his new world. It is a distance that also constrains Gyorgy's connection with other individuals he meets in the camp who, when referred to at all, are given generic nicknames like "traveller", "fancy-man", and "the Gypsy". It is only Bandi that we learn anything about and it is about him that Gyorgy says: "all these things, and much else besides, all of it knowledge essential to prison life, I was taught by Bandi Citrom, learning by watching and myself striving to emulate."


The horror of the story is in the way Gyorgy describes his slow descent into a shadow of his former self as his body becomes a living ghost. It is his striving, which ebbs lower and lower, that keeps him going. This is a difficult book to read in its unrelenting presentation of an extreme experience of degradation of an individual. Like others who have shared similar experiences Kertesz connects with the reader on a very human level sharing the story of an ordinary young man whose experience was extraordinary.


Fatelessness by Imre Kertesz. Tim Wilkinson, trans. Vintage Books, New York. 2004 (1975)


View all my reviews

They Were Found Wanting 

(The Transylvanian Trilogy, Book 2)

by Miklós Bánffy

"Beneath their feet the dust of the forest floor rose as they walked, and to Adrienne it was as if they floated weightless over clouds of heavenly vapour, returning unharmed from the gates of Hell, ready no to defy the whole wide world." (p 76)


This second volume of The Transylvanian Trilogy is an historical novel with romance at its core.  As Patrick Leigh Fermor, the famous travel writer, said: "Banffy is a born story-teller." But the story is merely the starting point for Banffy's extended romance of family, class and political relationships which mirrors the on-going upheaval in Hungarian society as it existed before the Great War.  Banffy's novel compares favorably with epics like War and Peace and great family tales like The Forsyte Saga. I appreciated the breadth of his literary and cultural references, for this is a story about a class that is as familiar with Chopin, Goethe and Schopenhauer as they are with the boudoir and the bazaar. The contrast of the power and beauty of nature, descriptions of the lands and forests surrounding the magnificent castles, punctuated with scenes of hunting and brilliant bazaars, thrilled me as a reader.  There is also the melancholic momentum of the inevitable decline that seems at times a  veritable attribute of the Hungarian psyche.  The trilogy is one of the least well-known novels of Eastern Europe at the end of an era limned by Barbara Tuchman with the title of her history, "The Proud Tower".


They Were Found Wanting by Miklos Banffy. Patrick Thursfield & Katalin Banffy-Jelen, trans. Arcadia Books, London. 2009 (1937)

Memoir as Novel

Memoirs of an 
Anti-Semite 

by Gregor von Rezzori

"The story I am telling seems as distant --  not only in space but also in time -- as if I'd merely dreamed it."

Rezzori's novel reads as if written with the authority of a memoir yet it is imbued with the "golden haze of myth" (p 243). The aroma of the dying embers of the fire that destroyed the empire into which the narrator was born fills each chapter of his life and rises to form a cloud that stands between him and his past and stands between the reader and the reality of his life, fiction though it may be. Moments of hilarity abound like the episode when the young boy of Czernowitz tries to improvise a uniform that will transform him into a young fraternity cadet. His humiliation is evident to all but himself yet this moment of humor is quickly transformed in the horrible reality of class and racial consciousness that bare the dark side of the world of our young memoirist.
The young boy grows into a gregarious dreamer whose artistic talent is wasted on crepe-paper window decorations and dreams that lay fallow in the byways of Bucharest. His thoughts ran to romantic melodrama: "At nineteen life is a drama threatening to become a tragedy every fifteen minutes." (p 72) His relations with women, torn between the unattainable ideal and his frequent lust for the gutter, lead him to philosophical meditations: "This brought up the question of free will, and that was his existential conflict." (p 119).
The final chapter, "Pravda" is the most shocking and revelatory section of the novel.  At age sixty we are in the consciousness of this observer of change:  "had he fallen into a deep slumber back then like Rip Van Winkle and awakened only in the world of today, he would go crazy with despair: what has happened to this world between then, 1919, and today 1979, is so incredible, has changed it so radically that one can scarcely believe the same person lived in both epochs.
Thus we are thrust with the narrator into the modern world, a new epoch, and one in which the question: What is truth? is both more difficult and more important than ever.  This is in his thoughts as we see the themes of the earlier sections reemerge in light of this radical age.
Rezzori uses colors and mood motifs with a veritable pastiche of breathtaking prose to hold the adventures and musings of the memoirist together and control the pace of the story. Hauntingly beautiful when it is not horrifying this is a monument to the writer's art and simply a great book.


Memoirs of an Anti-Semite by Gregor von Rezzori. New York Review Books. 2008 (1981)


View all my reviews

Journey to a Revolution: A Personal Memoir and History of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 

by Michael Korda

"For those who survived, life goes on, and even looking back in time, for those of us who were there, the events of October and November 1956 seem remote now, something out of another age." (p 205)




 Michael Korda is able to combine history and memoir in one package that at times reads like a novel, but at its heart is a very personal story of one man and his Hungarian heritage. The history is an inspiring story of the David versus Goliath battle that took place in Hungary in 1956. Korda was a student at Oxford who traveled to Budapest to bring help, medicine for hospitals, and to participate in one of the great moments in postwar European history. "The Hungarians stood up to the Soviet Union, bravely and alone; and although they lost, inevitably, they created a deep fissure in the monolith of communism" (p 204) that was omnipresent throughout Eastern Europe behind the "Iron Curtain." 
 Korda begins his story, after an introductory chapter, with an all too brief history of Hungary, a nation that was not unfamiliar with oppression by foreign rulers from the invasions of the Huns to the Empire of the Hapsburgs, but it had a proud culture.  Its' recent history was one of decline throughout the twentieth century.  The two world wars had been particularly harsh in the toll they took on the country's fortunes. I was impressed with the way Korda was able to transition from this history into his family's and ultimately his own position as a young man at Oxford - thus leading the reader into the main section of the book detailing the brutal details of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. His own adventures as an eyewitness add credibility to his account and his lucid and readable style make this a successful memoir and history. Reading this in combination with some of the literature produced by Hungarian writers added to my enjoyment of both the literature and the history.


Journey to a Revolution by Michael Korda. Harper Perennial, New York. 2007 (2006)


View all my reviews

Esther's Inheritance 

by Sándor Márai

"Suddenly I felt a great calm descend on me: I knew Lajos had come because he had no choice, and that we were welcoming him because we had no choice, and the whole thing was as terrifying, as unpleasant, and as unavoidable for him as it was for us."(p 53)


When a story is told in the first person you must ask yourself to what extent she is a reliable narrator. In Esther's case I found her invoking God (fate) in the first line of the book in which she would narrate events about a day from three years before. So I expected a story that would depend on her view, reliable or not, of what her life had been fated to be; in that I was not disappointed. Marai's simple, lucid beautiful prose is perfect for this story of betrayal, the memory of difficult times, and the twists of fate that lead Esther and her one-time lover, perhaps still so, to the confrontation that provides the climax to her story. Long ago the lover, Lajos, professed his love to Esther but then married her sister, Vilma, who has since died. At the beginning of the tale, we are told he is an inveterate liar: “He lied the way the wind howls, with a certain natural energy, in high spirits.” In the past, Lajos swindled Esther and her family and friends out of money and possessions. That he has not changed his ways is evident from his telegram, which is “like an opera libretto, just as theatrical, as dangerously childish and false, as everything he had said and written.” Esther is moved by "an irresistible voice" within her to which she must be true - that is her fate. Thus the inevitable confrontation with Lajos who had left her to her fate to grow old alone with her elderly cousin Nunu, is both compelling and revealing. It is this Lajos who, according to Esther "demanded that one should live dangerously"(p 45).  The story, imbued with an ethereal blend of family and history by Marai, depicts the background of Lajos' entry into the family through his friendship with Esther's brother Laci, a friendship that grew until it took on "an unsettling air of intimacy"(p32) and only ended with the death of  Vilma.  The narrative is related based on events that are related slowly through memory and conversations that help Esther struggle with her coming to be what she is, where she is and why she was so fated.  It is a story that is told in darkness lit by candles and ends with the sleep of Esther, but not with death.


Sandor Marai, whose novel Embers was published in English in 2001, was a Hungarian emigre who died in California in 1989. With the translation of Esther's Inheritance we have another jewel of a novel from this formerly unheralded writer of twentieth century Europe.


Esther's Inheritance: a novel by Sandor Marai. George Szirtes, trans. Alfred A. Knopf, 2008 (1939)


View all my reviews