The Review of Contemporary Fiction
Embers by Sandor Marai. Trans. Carol Brown JanewayMichael Pinker
Sándor Márai. Embers. Trans. Carol Brown Janeway. Knopf, 2001. 224 pp. $21.00.
The General-scion of an old Hungarian family, the son of an Officer of the Guards who was the Emperor’s friend-awaits his old friend Konrad, whom he has not seen for forty-one years, with profoundly mixed emotions. The first third of Sándor Márai’s 1942 novel (the first of his fiction to be translated into English) recounts the General’s anxious preparations for the arrival of his guest. Fortunately, his old nurse, Nini, will take care of all arrangements, as she so faithfully has attended the General since his birth. Yet even out on his estate in the Hungarian forest, at considerable remove from the world he assiduously has shunned since leaving the army, rumors of new carnage lately reach the General, as World War II begins to overwhelm Europe. When at length Konrad arrives, the General ushers him into the resplendently bedecked banquet room, unused since his wife Krisztina’s death, then spends the rest of the book speaking to him across the table, re-creating the tragic theater of his waking dream of four decades-a series of events pivotal to their now being in this very room together. Gradually, in the General’s urbane rendition of these painstakingly linked recollections, Márai, who died in San Diego at the age of eighty-nine, in exile from his native Hungary after having been driven out by the communists, fashions an acute edge to his perception of human nature and the modern world. In the General’s elegantly precise, scrupulously detailed account of his own defining moments, the old man confronts with increasing tension the strong feelings that he has harbored for so long. Márai deftly fashions a parable of love, betrayal, and vengeance of great force and subtlety, compelling in its sheer, sustained narrative power. [Michael Pinker]