A gyertyák csonkig égnek 1942, transl. Carol Brown Janeway, Vintage paperback 2002. 213 pp.

I have read this as a bookring book (see JE #29), then I bought a copy in Finnish, and then I found another Embers. Now, having read it once more, I would like to introduce it to another reader.

-ruzena

I hope you enjoy :)

After 4 and a half months the book made it safely to Cape Town, South Afrika.

It travelled just about the furthest it could go longitudinally without including the poles, which would have been 20 000 km in a 'straight' line. The Google Maps site is quite happy to suggest directions by road and ferry, indicating that 202 hours should be enough to cover the 15 035 km, provided there is no traffic. (Ha! I suspect traffic would be one of the lesser concerns of such a journey.)
http://tinyurl.com/kqqc8py

Most of the book's real route would have been by sea, of course, which makes it an even longer trip. And yet the book is in pristine condition, not looking the least bit tired.

Many thanks, ruzena! It's a lovely RABCK and I'm looking forward to reading it.

A finely woven, atmospheric novel that sweeps the reader away from whatever time and place s/he may be to experience a handful of lives during the latter days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. One emerges back into the here and now, seriously jetlagged, as if from time travel.

It is a book about friendship, ...

Friendship is no ideal state of mind; it is a law, and a strict one, on which the entire legal systems of great cultures were built. It reaches beyond personal desires and self-regard in men's hearts, its grip is greater than that of sexual desire, and it is proof against disappointment because it asks for nothing.

self-knowledge, ...

... deep inside you was a frantic longing to be something or someone other than you are. It is the greatest scourge a man can suffer, and the most painful. Life becomes bearable only when one has come to terms with who one is, both in one's own eyes and in the eyes of the world. We all of us must come to terms with what and who we are, and recognise that this wisdom is not going to earn us any praise, that life is not going to pin a medal on us for recognising and enduring our own vanity or egoism or baldness or our pot-belly. No, the secret is that there's no reward and we have to endure our characters and our natures as best we can, because no amount of experience or insight is going to rectify our deficiencies, our self-regard, or our cupidity. We have to learn that our desires do not find any real echo in the world. We have to accept that the people we love do not love us, or not in the way we hope. We have to accept betrayal and disloyalty, and hardest of all, that someone is finer than we are in character or intelligence.

There are worse things than suffering and death... it is worse to lose one's self-respect.

and the wisdom that old age brings.

And yet, sometimes facts are no more than pitiful consequences, because guilt does not reside in our acts but in the intentions that give rise to our act. Everything turns on our intentions.

Time is a purgatory that has cleansed all fury from my memories.

After reaching ninety, one ages differently from the way one aged at fifty or sixty: one ages without bitterness.

It is stories like these that make it easy to explain our enduring love affair with books.

Lent to potential BookCrosser SA on 2015-05-31.