Embers

Rating:
Summary: Elegantly Written
Review: This lovely book has been rediscovered after being out of print for many years. The author survived WWII only to have his work suppressed by the Communists in Hungary for many years. The author writes of two men, once best friends, who meet one last time on the eve of WWII after a hiatus of 41 years. The story itself harkens back to an earlier era, the years prior to WWII as the Austro-Hungarian empire fades and the brutal 20th century dawns. The historical background is suggested, not explored in detail, but knowing what is coming gives special poignancy to the discussions of friendship, honor, trust and love which form the novel's core. It's hard to say more without being a spoiler--suffice it to say that this slim beautifully written story proves that one need not churn out 500 pages to create a masterpiece. I give this one 4 stars only because I was uncomfortable with the notion that only men can enjoy the type of relationship that the narrator thought he once had with his friend. But the plot is riveting and you will reflect on the ending for a while. A great find.

Rating:
Summary: Slow and Steady
Review: The synopsis was captivating: "... as wine stirs the blood, it is time to talk of old passions and that last, fateful meeting".

How many of us are familiar with the sentence above? A very intimate and enticing lure to the reader, Sandor Marai is a great story-teller and Carol Brown Janeway had done well in translating.

The star of the story, General Henrik, lights up many truths about life for us. How does one cope with losing a loved one to another who is equally close to the heart? What does waiting do to the soul? What does friendship mean?

Albeit an intriguing tale, I was rather disappointed by the ending, which seemed to offer no closure. Just why so? Read on.

Rating:
Summary: A glass of wine and a warm fire
Review: This is a once in a lifetime book. This is not my typical type of book but it captivates and entrances from the outset. I curled up and didn't stop until I finished and can't wait to read it again. I've recommended it to my book club. It is the ultimate story of friendship, love ,regret and retrospect. This will remain in my collection

Rating:
Summary: A dissapointment
Review: Embers by Sandor Marai was highly recommended to me but I was disappointed with the book. It is a quick read that goes nowhere.
The story is about two men, Henrik and Konrad, who met in the military academy when they were ten years old and became inseparable; however, they have not seen each other or communicated in forty-one years. Now, Konrad is visiting Henrik. During their evening visit, Henrik does the majority of the talking and reveals why he has not talked to Konrad for so long. Since Konrad says so little, the reader never really knows if Henrik's reasons are real, his imagination or just a miscommunication.
This story emphasizes the importance of communication. A misunderstanding can jeopardize friendships and relationships when talking could clear up the misunderstanding. It also stresses the importance of forgiving and forgetting. We must not be obsessed with events that have happened in our past. We must live life in the present and be happy.
My favorite character is Konrad. He was poor when he was a child and has lived his life to the fullest. He has not dwelled on the past as Henrik has. Henrik has dwelled on the disagreement with Konrad for forty-one years. I love to read about characters that do the things that I always strive to do.

Rating:
Summary: Friendship and love
Review: I was surprized to find how much this book held my interest. The writing is mostly descriptive with very little action. The stage was set and a conversation ensued which was mostly one sided. Yet I felt I was in the room listening to the General reveal the path his life had taken due to the choice made by Konrad, his boyhood friend. Revelations occurred one by one in a description of dawning of awareness about what friendship and love mean and require. I found the book fascinating.

Rating:
Summary: Lots of Angst
Review: Marai's tale of betrayed love and friendship is told with an interesting approach. The book is an extended reflective narrative wherein an old man relates his view of betrayal to his former friend who has come for a last visit.

Beneath the stilted retelling of the story lies a suppressed passion that is reminiscient of classic Russian novels. Think Dostoyevksy but not so painfully long.

Marai explores the nature of friendship and committment from a great many angles, but somehow the main character never acknowledges the potential for real friendship between a man and a woman.

The responses by the main characters to the betrayal are bizarre by modern standards. There's a real temptation to reach into the novel, slap them and say "get over it."

Nonetheless, Marai has created a sad, but hypnotic reality, that makes for compelling reading.

Sit in front of a fireplace, get a glass of good red wine, sit down and enjoy this book.

Rating:
Summary: An Elegant Story
Review: There have been many enlightening reviews of Embers that compare this book with other famous works by better known authors and the signifigance it has as a metaphor for the state of Europe at the time it was written. As a reader I was not interested in either viewpoint but just looking for an engaging, well written story. So bear with me in that respect. Embers tells the story of two old friends who have not spoken or seen each other for 41 years. Henrik, a military man part of the priveledged upper class and Konrad also in the military but from a much less priveledged background. The story recounts the men's friendship from their first meeting in boarding school through their thirties. This novel is engrossing because the reader knows that something has happened and is slowly, tantalizingly brought to the climax of one fateful day in their life. This book although about the actual events that take place in their lives is really about the philosophies behind human attachment; love, betrayal, jealousy, admiration, envy, honor and friendship. We as the reader get to see these played out in Henrik's recalling of the events that take place between the two men. Henrik never really grasps until much later in his life that his friend is a "different" kind of man. He is left to ponder during his recalling to Konrad, if ever they were truly friends or the brothers he once thought them to be. We the readers are treated to a wonderfully worded, literary feast with a philisophical treatise on nature of friendship. This gives the novel modern day relevance and timeless appeal . It is not a face paced slick production, but a slow moving, thought provoking, winding story that is sure to be enjoyed by most readers.

Rating:
Summary: The Silence Between Wittgenstein and Marai
Review: Needless to say I thought the novel wonderful, especially the elegant and understated way Marai ends it, and the hypnotic use of repetition and motifs.

I think the translation is beautiful, although it is a shame it is from the German rather than the original Hungarian. Also, a literal translation of the title, "The candles are burnt down", might have been better than "Embers", not least because it is also a line from near the end of the novel (p. 208).

I think that the trouble with how the reviews have dealt with it are that everyone thought it a "jewelled antique" (New York Times), rather than as a piece in its own time. Márai was a serious and prolific writer and a deep thinker. He was born in Hungary in 1900 and reared in a part and age of the World where philosophy and its bearing on history and culture were meat and drink.

Marai wrote this in occupied Hungary in 1942, sitting between two warring ideologies of mass action: Leninist-Marxism and National Socialism. Superficially, the two main characters embody the opposing moralities of martial virtue and artistic sensibility. However, at a deeper level, they both oppose the two ideologies which were tearing Central Europe in half. They both exhibit a belief in the importance of the individual over the herd. Márai is showing his fellow Europeans that you can have honour without militarism and passion without mass slaughter. The General cites Plato (p. 109) but Márai's stance towards him is pure Nietzsche:

"Things do not simply happen to one . . . It is not true that fate slips silently into our lives. It steps through the door that we have opened, and we invite it to enter." (p.170)

There can be little doubt that Nietzsche at his best would have classed both Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia as the triumph of the most cruel herd-instincts (of course, being a madman with a distaste for logic, he was not always at his best).

Equally fascinating is Márai's obsession with notions of silence and what is sayable. It is also a keynote with the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who was born in Vienna in 1889, and only published one, rather technical book in his life, so it is doubtful Marai had come across him. However, one theme in that book is to be found in Embers.

Wittgenstein had been presented by Bertrand Russell with several problems in philosophy which can be summed up as follows: there is a problem with talking about how language manages to describe the World. The problem is that when one tries to describe how it does, one is still using language. One can invent a new language to describe how the old language does it (e.g. in logic, one uses second-order logic to describe how first-order logic works). However, this presents us with a new problem: how does the first language relate to the second? One can again invent a new language (e.g. third-order logic) to do this, but again you just kick the problem up to a higher level, and so we have an infinite regress.

Think in terms of pictures. If one draws a picture in an unfamiliar style another person might not understand how it picture the objects it is meant to. To solve this, one might draw in the corner how the picture is to be understood, e.g. by doing a sketch of the first picture, and then a sketch using a more common style, and then lines connecting the relevant points to show how the one maps onto the other. However, if someone asks how the more common style is to be viewed, we are in trouble. We could show how that maps onto another common style, but if they are unfamiliar with any style, the one thing we can not represent to them in the picture is how pictures work in general, i.e. we can not represent Representation itself.

Wittgenstein got around this: he said that attempts to talk about Representation always ended in senseless statements. They are senseless in that they do not strictly say anything at all. However, what they do is "show" us something about language, by the very fact that they appear to say something significant and philosophical, and yet actually say nothing at all. By reading the senseless statements of Wittgenstein's work, one is climbing up a ladder to a place where one can see things clearly. Once one is at the top, one sees his work as senseless, and one can throw away the ladder. In summary, all the really important things can not be said, they can only be shown. Now look at a random selection from Márai, mainly from chapter endings:

"As if one of them were in the other's debt. It could not be put into words." (p. 47)

"They both sat in silence, watching the flames, until the manservant came to announce dinner." (p. 79)

"Each at his end of the table, they raise their glasses in silence and drain them." (p. 93)

"What can one ask people with words? And what is the value of an answer given in words instead of in the coin of one's entire life?" (p. 163)

"The men take leave of each other with a handshake, a deep bow, wordlessly." (p. 211)

"But like every kiss, this one is an answer, a clumsy but tender answer to a question that eludes the power of language." (p. 213 [closing sentence])

Note that they had both read the novelist Kürnberger, Wittgenstein using a quote from him for the motto to the his book,

". . . and anything a man knows, anything he has not merely heard rumbling and roaring, can be said in three words."

Compare this with Márai's,

"It's as if those few words had captured the whole meaning of life, but afterwards one always talks about something else." (p. 32)

Ironically, I wish I could say more, but Amazon says no.

Rating:
Summary: Some thoughts upon reading "Embers"
Review: 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...

Rating:
Summary: A great book about friendship - even after 40 years
Review: I enjoyed this book very much. I could "see" the book pages, this is very nicely written about an era past. Captivating.