Embers

Rating:
Summary: a dry wine
Review: "Embers" is the story of two men who haven't seen each other in many decades and now are finally reunited, for a single evening, during which they hope to get at the truth behind the betrayal that came between them.

This book was highly recommended to me but, for my taste, I found it rather dry and slow-moving. This may be a weakness of the translation or (more likely) simply a reflection of my own taste in literature. I get bored when reading pages and pages about the table cloth and the flickering candles, etc. The story always kept me at a distance and finishing it took tremendous will-power.

I would have liked something a little more accessible and with some flavor to it. This book went down like a too-dry wine.

Rating:
Summary: A great mystery.....
Review: More than anything I want to know how it is that a book as marvelous and as moving as "Embers" is could have laid in obscurity for some many years. It's a wonderful book, worthy of the praise bestowed upon it. To the person who writes that the sentence structure is at grade school level and almost felt compelled to correct the sentence structure, I say, get real. If poor sentence structure were sufficient reason to dismiss literary talent, we would have to dismiss authors like Pynchon, Cummings, Proust, Camus, Kafka, etc. "Embers" is not a dissertation on the architecture of grammar or the like. It is a poetic and spellbinding, albeit not ground breaking, tale of lost dreams, desire and coming to terms with the fact that that which was once was so fundamental in your life is now quietly and quickly fading. Absorbing and eloquent as one could possible want, Anyone who's ever known the heartache of losing a friend whom one considered a brother/sister, will instantly relate to the General's sentiments and sense of loss and betrayal. Beautiful, through and through. The imagery is so sparkling and the pain so palpable, you will feel as though you've lived it all alongside the characters.

Rating:
Summary: Dinner until dawn, more than 40 years after
Review: Henrik and Konrad, inseparable companions from boyhood through their thirties, meet again for one last time in their old age--more than 40 years after they last saw each other and the woman who came between them. They talk from dinner until dawn, seated at the same places where they had last sat together in their youth, as they explore the mystery of a few taut days more than four decades earlier that broke their relationship and bent their lives. Those events, which neither man fully understands, illuminate questions of friendship and love, loyalty and betrayal, honor and truth--which the two men explore for a night by dying firelight until morning parts them forever.

The author, Sandor Marai, was a celebrated Hungarian novelist before World War II. But he fled abroad when the postwar Communist government suppressed his work, including this book. Exiled and forgotten, he committed suicide in California in 1989, a year before this book was republished in Hungary. All his novels are now scheduled for republication and translation.

Rating:
Summary: sometimes you can judge a book by its cover
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: The best book I've read in a long time
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Evocative story from Central Europe
Review: Interesting story, beautifully written and if not for having to go to work I would have read it straight through since it is a rather short book. Some of the characters could have been better developed and their behavior further explained but I liked it best because of the way it brings back a time and place. Although written in 1942 most of the important events in the story take place at the turn of the century and the flashbacks brilliantly recreate the atmosphere of that period. Well worth reading by everyone interested in Central European affairs (pun intended!)

Rating:
Summary: Embers
Review: Sándori Márai's Embers is an enchanting novel about friendship, love, betrayal, and consequence. It takes place in a castle deep within the Carpathian Mountains, where loneliness often takes center stage. The old aristocrat who lives there rarely leaves his room and keeps most of his castle closed off, and most of his memories as well. When he receives a letter from a friend who he has not seen in forty-one years, he must prepare to welcome his guest and face those memories which he would like to remain forgotten. The two men argue, often in silence, over the past. Accusations are made and denied about a mysterious meeting that had occurred in the same room, forty-one years before. Now is the time to reconcile.
Embers holds the attention of its readers right from the start. It a masterpiece full of intrigue and suspense. Originally published in Budapest in 1942, it has become an international sensation and will continue to capture the minds of modern readers for years to come.

Rating:
Summary: If music be the food of love ...
Review: I was fortunate enough to come across Embers at a ridiculously low price in a book sale and having had my appetite for foreign writers whetted by Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveller, I decided to plunge in at the deep end. For fans of the phenomenon that is 'magic realism' this will definitely appeal but, as much as I loved this novel, there is bound to be a voice out there somewhere that will level the accusation that it is pretentious. Incidentally Embers is written with the same prose quality and the same level of erudition that haunts Invisible Cities (Calvino again) but how to approach it with the intention of writing an original review is another matter!

On a superficial level, Embers is a novel about the loyalty, Platonic love and the inevitable betrayal of these values that will occur when a woman comes between two men. Henrik is an aristocrat who has chosen to withdraw from the society around him and is awaiting the renewal of a friendship with Konrad, his former companion who he has not seen for some 41 years. As he prepares for Konrad's arrival it becomes apparent that whilst universal time has continued, the temporal status of Henrik's existence is such that he hasn't adjusted from the moment that his faith in those around him was fractured by an act that he can neither explain nor rationalise. Having maintained an unquestionable fidelity to each other there came a point where the modern collided with the old-world and chose to progress rather than remain stoic to its traditions.

Henrik's only remaining companion is his nurse, Nini, and it is in this permanent isolation, continued stasis that they choose to remain. The friendship between Konrad and Henrik was borne out of childhood meeting and a military upbringing in which the social deference and economic differences were acknowledged and respected. It is this feudal, hierarchical society that demands a constant awareness of place and an individual's importance but Konrad's inability to adjust to rigid constraints leads him to seek expression through the arts, most notably music. It is worth bearing in mind this is a novel with a context that could be seen as politically stifled and so when Konrad discovers a form of communication that is dangerously free and personal he can break rank from the other soldiers around him. By transgressing the rules of his own military world this poses a threat to the life that Henrik has introduced him to.

The opportunity that Henrik offers Konrad reflects the nature of Embers. Although the novel transcends generations it eventually returns to the point at which the decision must be made. Time cannot progress until a resolution has been found, Henrik cannot return to the outside world until he can explain and resolve the problems within his own. It is a matter of duty and honour to his previous generations that Henrik atones for his error in allowing an outsider into the culture and values they created but Konrad must pay his own penance for his decision to put love before friendship.

Above all it is a novel about the desire to return to forgotten cultures, about the different levels of love and friendship but it is also the work of a writer whose prose is immaculate and must be sampled to gain the full flavour.

Rating:
Summary: Beautifully put together; a bit heavy on the monologue
Review: This book was recommended to me by a veteran...bookseller. When I'm not looking for something in particular, I rely on him for recommendations, and he never fails. His tastes run more to the foreign than mine, but I am (as ever) glad I took his advice on this one.

This book is the monologue of an old man, living in well-ordered isolation in the family country manor. He is full of bitterness, shown in the almost angry way he orders things in his life and in his mind -- everything in its place, no deviation, remembering what chair was where and what table decorations were used several decades ago on a certain night.

From the beginning, when he receives a letter from his old friend telling him he's in town, he's also bent on his "revenge," which unfortunately mostly turns out, apparently, to be trying to talk his opponent to death.

Another quirk: The narrator gloats in the fact that this old friend is subject to his control in every small detail. If the narrator wants to go out onto the balcony, by God, they're going out onto the balcony, and his friend had better submit. What a bizzare way of thinking.

Despite the heaviness of the monologue and a bit of melodrama in the woods, every sentence is elegantly written. The scene with the most potential, and which I would have liked to have seen developed much further, was a flashback to the narrator's youth. He had taken ill, apparently because when he arrived at his grandmother's castle in France he found everything so unnatural to his senses, and the only person able to revive him was his nanny, who travels without rest or food for four days to reach him.

This nanny is still with him when he is an old man, and I was eager for more about her. The author built her up to be a major figure in the narrator's life, then relegated her to a simple servant's role in those parts which take place in the present.

One of the most outstanding things about this book was the exquisite typesetting and layout. Knopf did a magnificent job with the inside of this book, from the paper selection (a nice heavy cream) to the font. It was a satisfaction just to turn the pages.

Rating:
Summary: Themes and Variations
Review: 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.