Sandor Marai
publisher
Knopf
format
Hardcover
pages
160
Frank Delaney
The Flight of Gemma Hardy
Margot Livesey
American Dervish
Ayad Akhtar
Time and Again
Jack Finney
From the great Hungarian writer of EMBERS and CASANOVA IN BOLZANO comes the tautly suspenseful novel of an unrequited love and its vivid consequences twenty years later. Marai was born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1900 and died in San Diego in 1989. He rose to fame as one of the leading novelists in Hungary in the 1930’s. Profoundly antifascist, he survived the war, but persecution by the Communists drove him from his country in 1948, first to Italy and then to the United States. EMBERS was published for the first time in English in 2001, and my friend Russell Perreault at Vintage Anchor Books recommends that you read EMBERS first. Put Marai on your stack; you won’t be disappointed.
About the AuthorSándor Márai (originally Sándor Károly Henrik Grosschmied de Mára) (April 11, 1900 - February 22, 1989) was a Hungarian writer and journalist.
He was born in the city of Kassa in Austria-Hungary (now Košice in Slovakia) to an old Saxon family. In his early years, Márai travelled to and lived in Frankfurt, Berlin, and Paris and briefly considered writing in German, but eventually chose his mother language, Hungarian, for his writings. He settled in Krisztinaváros, Budapest, in 1928. In the 1930s, he gained prominence with a precise and clear realist style. He was the first person to write reviews of the work of Kafka.
He wrote very enthusiastically about the Vienna Awards, in which Germany forced Czechoslovakia and Romania to give back part of the territories which Hungary lost in the Treaty of Trianon. Nevertheless, Márai was highly critical of the Nazis as such and was considered "profoundly antifascist," a dangerous position to take in wartime Hungary.
Marai authored forty-six books, mostly novels, and was considered by literary critics to be one of Hungary's most influential representatives of middle class literature between the two world wars. His 1942 book Embers (Hungarian title: A gyertyák csonkig égnek, meaning "The Candles Burn Down to the Stump") expresses a nostalgia for the bygone multi-ethnic, multicultural society of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, reminiscent of the works of Joseph Roth. In 2006 an adaptation of this novel for the stage, written by Christopher Hampton, was performed in London.
He also disliked the Communist regime that seized power after World War II, and left - or was driven away - in 1948. After living for some time in Italy, Márai settled in the city of San Diego, California, in the United States.
He continued to write in his native language, but was not published in English until the mid-1990s. Márai's Memoir of Hungary (1944-1948) provides an interesting glimpse of post World War II Hungary under Soviet occupation. Like other memoirs by Hungarian writers and statesmen, it was first published in the West, because it could not be published in the Hungary of the post-1956 Kádár era. The English version of the memoir was published posthumously in 1996. After his wife died, Márai retreated more and more into isolation. He committed suicide] by a gunshot to his head in San Diego in 1989.
Largely forgotten outside of Hungary, his work (consisting of poems, novels, and diaries) has only been recently "rediscovered" and republished in French (starting in 1992), Catalan, Italian, English, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Icelandic, Korean, and other languages too, and is now considered to be part of the European Twentieth Century literary canon.
Beyond the book
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. In this spellbinding fourth novel to be published posthumously in English (after The Rebels), Márai (1900-1989) weaves a passionate tale about a woman whose chance at love is very nearly stolen from her. Harbored peaceably at her family home in middle age with a cousin as her only companion after a lifelong disappointment in love, Esther receives a telegram from her former flame, Lajos, a masterful con artist who had declared his love for Esther, but then married her younger sister, Vilma. Lajos is locally beloved and reviled, and his dazzling return-with his two grown children by Vilma (who has since died) and a mysterious other woman and her son to whom he is indebted in tow-raises dark suspicions in Esther and her relatives. Márai's characterization of Lajos through the eyes of skeptical, still smitten Esther is deliciously portentous; the deceptions woven around these characters introduce a sharp sliver of danger into the narrative, especially as Esther's reliability is called into question. Márai is a fascinating writer readers of English will want more of. (Nov.)
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From Booklist
*Starred Review* Márai is gaining a reputation among discerning fiction readers as a remarkably effective chronicler of the culture of the old Austro-Hungarian empire. He was born in that hodgepodge of a nation in 1900 and died in the U.S. in 1989. His fame in Hungary in the 1930s preceded persecution by the Communist regime, which led to his flight to the U.S. This latest novel of his to be translated into English follows the appreciatively received Casanova in Bolzano (2004) and The Rebels (2007). Like its predecessors, it is deeply psychological; little happens outwardly, the "action" generally taking place within the characters' minds. The main character, Esther, lives with her old cousin in the rundown family home. She had a great love, the impossible Lajos, who married Esther's sister instead, and Esther has since reached the conclusion that Lajos is a compulsive liar-but nonetheless a charming and persuasive one. In a first-person narrative, Esther recalls in vivid and gripping detail the events of the day Lajos came back into her life, and old habits on both sides fall back into place. Pristinely wrought and breathtakingly incisive. --Brad Hooper