Embers

Rating:
Summary: Simple elegance
Review: The beauty of the book is its simple elegance. The story revolves around the reunion of two friends after 41 years. How and why they separated is the backdrop for an exposition on betrayal and the one who is betrayed. Even though the book is translated, the flavor and beauty of the narration are preserved.

Embers was actually a book recommended to me by my colleague at work. Interestingly, it turned out to be edited by a colleague of my sister's at Knopf. I would have to say that this book ranks as one of my all-time best books and will probably place as one of the best books that I've read for 2001.

Rating:
Summary: Horrendous writing, laughable charaterizations
Review: I should say up front that I only made it to page 60 - and even that was a struggle.

This is grade school writing here folks, do not be fooled; I couldn't help mentally correcting each page as I went along for poor sentence structure. The author tells you everything, leaving nothing to imagination and hence, creates zero drama, tension, real characters. The love story of the main character's parents reads like a Danielle Steel bodice-ripper, and cliches elbow each other for space in every sentence (perhaps that's translator Janeway rather than the original author). Somebody really put one over on the public here. Don't be fooled by the exotic Austrian setting, or the NY Times review (what book did they read?), this is REALLY bad stuff. Try Musil's "The Man Without Qualities" instead. Or re-paint the living room.

Rating:
Summary: Hungarian masterpiece
Review: I read this book after reading rave reviews in the UK and was not disappointed as it is beautifully written. I seem to be going through a Hungarian phase at the moment so if you like this I can also recommend another Hungarian book called Journey by Moonlight by Antal Szerb. Both are magical, imaginative flights of fancy and both open your eyes to a whole new world. I really enjoyed them both.

Rating:
Summary: Hm.
Review: For all it's metaphors and issues about the larger themes of life, friendship, love, betrayal, and death, Embers is not a subtle book; it broadsides you with maudlin emotion under the mask of stoic dignity. One character is an aristocrat, the other a pauper, they are friends and the tension is supposed to reveal something about our own materialistic identity, but the book is delivered in a monologue, and grows boring. The idea of a theme about conflicting social backgrounds is interesting, but the reality is that neither of these two have very much to say. That itself could count for something, but they talk and they talk some more. They are too proud to do any thinking, and you are left to assume the weight of a tortured elderly general that the world left behind. The characters in Embers are shells of something larger, and you stick your finger through it trying to find the substance. I suspect the applause given to Sandor Marai is so the literary world can make a martyr into a legend, it gives critics something new to write about -- everyone wants to claim a new discovery. It's a good book, but it's not great; a footnote of 20th century writing.

Rating:
Summary: On how a passion can make you live more than expected.
Review: Embers seemed to me an excellent brief novel on passions (friendship, betrayal,love and revenge, mainly). The first few chapters are told by an impersonal narrator that sets the infromation needed to start knowing the two main characters: The General and his friend Konrad. After that, most of the story is told by the General himself as a dialogue with Konrad, 41 years after the main events happened.
You will find a lot of ideas interwinged in the General's words but two are central, from my perspective: first, that a passion can make you live more that you would expect; the General lives those 41 years with only one purpose on his mind: to have a last meeting with Konrad, and it can be infered that the same happens to Konrad. Second, that there is a true beyond the facts when you are dealing with human behaviour, motifs, and intentions. To discover that "deeper" true is difficult but attainable. It is also worthwhile.

Although perhaps the novel deals more with ideas than with events or facts it will not diminish its emotional strenght and it will remain a very moving story. Excellent.

Rating:
Summary: A Very Good Idea Gone Wrong
Review: I picked up this book (in Hungarian and English) with such high hopes and great expectations. It sounded magnificent: a secluded castle at the foot of the Carpathians, a beautiful woman long dead, a secret about to be revealed. I was sadly disappointed.

Instead of taking us back to the past and dramatizing in scenes what could have been a wonderfully engrossing story, Sandor Marai (no relation!) keeps us firmly anchored in the present where one character delivers a book-length monologue to a second character, informing this second character of what he already knows for the benefit of the reader. Surely this method of storytelling was already dated in Marai's day. Why he chose to employ it is beyond me.

I'm not a fan of flashbacks, but, in my opinion at least, this story would have been greatly enriched through the use of a frame. In a frame, we begin in the present, then return to the past for the body of the story, and finally wind up in the present once again for the conclusion.

The use of a frame also would have allowed us to get to know all three main characters: Henrik, Konrad and Krisztina. As it is, the fascinating Krisztina is long dead when the story begins and Konrad barely gets to utter ten words. The bulk of the book is taken up with Henrik's rambling, and sometimes dull, monologue. Had we been allowed to know all three characters, to experience their needs and emotions, the book would have come to life, the story would have been transformed.

I do have to give credit where credit is due: there are some very lovely set-pieces and Konrad certainly has more patience than I. I would have said, Jó éjszakát! (Goodnight! in Hungarian) after an hour of Henrik's tirade; poor Konrad endured it the whole night long.

Marai has taken a magnificent idea and deprived it of all story tension, characterization and surprise. I just don't feel it was a very good choice.

Rating:
Summary: Exquisite
Review: The General, alone in his vast home, is expecting a visit from his childhood friend, Konrad, 41 years after they last saw each other: he wants to question Konrad about precisely why their relationship ended, questions which have been eating away at the General for those long 41 years. Will the arrival of Konrad provide the answers the General has sought?

The majority of this novel is essentially a monologue by the General as he relates his interpretation of the events leading up to Konrad's departure those 41 years ago. The monologue takes up all of a meal the two men share and goes on all night. This is the great irony of the book - the General is seeking answers from Konrad, but does he really want to hear them?

Marai explores the joys and pains of human relationships, examines the meaning of friendship, and asks basic questions about the reasonableness of expecting certainty and security from our friends and loved ones. We demand so much of others to complete and fulfil our own lives, yet can any other human meet such expectations? Why are we disappointed by our friends' behaviour when the expectations we have of them are so unrealistic?

I thought that this was a superbly reflective and elegiac novel. Proust had covered this ground before ("Embers" was first published in 1942, long after Proust's death), but nonetheless this work deserves praise in its own right.

Rating:
Summary: FLAWLESS!
Review: This book is a diamond: brilliant, clear, cold, and hard.

The language is particularly remarkable because the credits state that that the English transation of this book was made not from the orginal Hungarian but from the German translation of the Hungarian. It is a double tour de force of the translators' art.

Among this work's many charms is the period detail of the Austro-Hungarian empire at the very end of its long run, and an Old World culture that still echoes in memories of the airs and graces of immigrant grandparents. They say that history is written by the victorious (in war); well, although literature is most frequently published by the victorious as well, the vanquished keep on writing, and manuscripts don't burn.

As other reviewers have stated, the arresting story line of this book is told in the course of a single evening, but covers the lives of two old men beginning from the time they were boys, and centering an ambiguous act or acts of betrayal which occured at their last meeting forty-one years earlier.

There is not a single extraneous word, or wasted image, in this volume. This becomes more obvious upon second reading once one has satisfied oneself that one has solved, to the extent possible, the mystery presented in the storyline. The depth and subtlety of psychological insight that Marai brings to this work is astonishing.

The effect is a combination of the film "My Dinner with Andre," but without the humor, as written by Josephine Hart, the author of _Damage_. What is truly phenomenal to the 21st century American reader is that an author of such power and mastery could have lived and died (in Los Angeles, or thereabouts, in 1989!) utterly unknown until recently.

I disagree with comparisons of this author to Proust or Dostoevsky. He is more nearly akin to Pushkin, and this work can stand next to the _Queen of Spades_. You will not regret the time spent reading this book.

Rating:
Summary: Will later be called a Master
Review: Indeed a rediscovered genius as top-star reviewers in the Washington Post, NY Times, and NY Review of Books have proclaimed, as well as Knopf, who give a couple generous words about the author in this hardcover edition. Short enough you can re-read, and here lies part of its magic: that it can be re-read. For, as Barthes noted, it is in re-reading that the role of reading is enacted. A wonder to be mined - I just finished reading it and very well might do it again in the next couple days, if not later.

To situate its ideas, it is centrally concerned with time and memory. With its obvious European pre-cursor of Proust there are some similarities and many differences, in both their ideas about time and memory as well as how the style and form they are encapsulated in. Other recurring themes are friendship, knowledge (both what it is and how it is attainted), alterity, and love. With the last of these, the book does engage in the triangulation theorized by Girard to be at the heart of the European novel's form, maybe because it so deftly concerns itself with many of the long standing great articulations of literaty themes. But this small academic fitting is but a mere aside to the laundry list of reasons why this novel will soon be in the pantheon of the European novel, and world literature in general. I eagerly await teaching this work in the future firmly within the lineage of literaty masters it stands: Dostoevksy, Flaubert, Proust, Mann... and, as we see now, Marai. Thank you Knopf, and please bring more.

Please read this novel and see why I could ever spout such ridiculous things so quickly.

Rating:
Summary: Grand Rediscovery
Review: The good news is that a substantial body of work from Mr. Sandor Marai of Hungary has been found once again, in a manner of speaking, and for those who love brilliant writing, the Publisher Knoph is translating his work into English. His novel, "Embers" is one of the better books I have read this year.

An old castle in The Carpathian Mountains is the setting for what approaches a monologue. The mood of the book is consistent with another who hailed from these mountains as Vlad The Impaler. The book is not a horror novel, rather a disturbing psychological thriller that explores what is truly at the heart of an issue after it has been examined for over 4 decades. Coincidentally the age of the author when he wrote the work, and the time that expires between one dinner between the closest of friends and its sequel, are both 42 years. The book is remarkable as he writes of the view of life from the perspective of people in their 8th and 10th decades of life, and the prose reads as authoritative and appropriate. It reads like a man who has lived twice as long as the author had lived when he penned this work. The writing is wise.

Mr. Marai takes a familiar theme that would normally result in rapid responses from those involved, and instead suspends any conclusion for over 4 decades. He presents two boys that grow up together and form bonds that are so absolute, there is nowhere for their friendship to improve. Their bond is complete; their backgrounds are polar opposites, which may give rise to the fall. There is an intentional breach, and then there is an event that never gets beyond the "almost" stage. Had it occurred it would have been the greatest of tragedies.

The injured party, whether through right or the power of family and position, could have done anything he chose to his friend and betrayer. For over 40 years he could have easily sought him out, but yet he never did, he never even contemplated seeking a traditional revenge. When the faithless friend comes to visit, dinner is served with a meticulous eye for the reproduction of every detail of the dinner 42 years before. There are only two at the table as opposed to three, and yet the missing third is a tangential issue, important but not the focus. The host queries his guest about events of which he knows all the details save for one. He already knows what happened, and is comfortable as to motive. The author builds such expectations in the reader that you will wonder if the final act can possibly match the first.

There is only one question, however there are two sources for the truth. The host for most of his life has held one and he has never violated the seal, his friend alone can provide the answer if the book remains closed. The resolution of the tale is brilliant. It is complex, and also beautifully logical when expressed as this one character of fiction has decanted it for most of his life. There is no written slight of hand. This is a completely new approach, a unique response to what should seem cliché. Absolutely great reading.