Embers

by Sándor Márai | Literature & Fiction | This book has not been rated.
ISBN: 0375707425 Global Overview for this book
Registered by goatgrrl of New Westminster, British Columbia Canada on 11/29/2005
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1 journaler for this copy...
Journal Entry 1 by goatgrrl from New Westminster, British Columbia Canada on Tuesday, November 29, 2005
A 1942 novel by Hungarian novelist Sándor Márai, picked from the Guardian's list of Top Ten Eastern European novels and purchased as part of a virtual book binge on Amazon.ca.

(Left: Statue of Sándor Márai in Košice, Slovakia.)

Journal Entry 2 by goatgrrl from New Westminster, British Columbia Canada on Thursday, November 23, 2006
Embers begins -- technically -- in August 1940, but most of the action in the book is connected to a mysterious event which takes place forty-one years earlier, in the summer of 1899. At the start of the novel the two main characters, Henrik ("the General") and his old friend Konrad, both retired military men, are preparing to meet at the former's Hungarian estate for a dinner -- their first meeting in forty-one years. Through a monologue delivered over dinner by Henrik, Embers describes the 1899 occurrence which fractured their friendship, a moment leading to a discovery so painful it ruined Henrik's life (he has remained all these years sequestered in a suite of rooms at his estate, with only his ninety-one year old former nurse for company).

Henrik and Konrad met as children, and were roommates at military school in Vienna in the 1880s, during the heyday of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Thus, in addition to the domestic drama outlined in Embers, with its themes of intimacy, marital fidelity, betrayal, guilt, grief and revenge, the book illuminates -- silently, but no less poignantly -- the broader social and political changes affecting the Hungarian aristocracy between the turn of the last century and WWII. In fact, the novel takes place during the same period (and covers many of the same themes) as Miklós Bánffy's They Were Counted, and the two made for an interesting almost back-to-back read.

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(Top left: a 2001 cartoon of Sándor Márai by David Levine, courtesy New York Review of Books' David Levine Gallery.)

Journal Entry 3 by goatgrrl from New Westminster, British Columbia Canada on Monday, December 4, 2006
Given to my neighbour Katarina, who -- like author Márai -- was born in the city of Košice, Slovakia.

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