Sándor Márai Books In Order

Embers

The rediscovery of a masterpiece of Central European literature originally published in Budapest in 1942 and un known to modern readers until last year. An extraordinary novel about a triangular relationship, about love, friendship, and fidelity, about betrayal, pride, and true nobility. In a castle at the foot of the Carpathian Mountains, an old aristocrat waits to greet the friend he has not seen for forty one years. In the course of this one night, from dinner until dawn, the two men will fight a duel of words and silences, of stories, of accusations and evasions, that will encompass their entire lives and that of a third person, missing from the candlelit dining hall the now dead chatelaine of the castle. The last time the three of them sat together was in this room, after a stag hunt in the forest. The year was 1900. No game was shot that day, but the reverberations were cataclysmic. And the time of reckoning has finally arrived. Already a great international best seller, Embers is a magnificent addition to world literature in the English language.

Conversations in Bolzano

Another rediscovered masterpiece from the Hungarian novelist whose Embers became an international bestseller a sensuous, suspenseful, aphoristic novel about the world’s most notorious seducer and the encounter that changes him forever.

In 1756 Giacomo Casanova escapes from a Venetian prison and resurfaces in the Italian village of Bolzano. Here he receives an unwelcome visitor: the aging but still fearsome Duke of Parma, who years before had defeated Casanova in a duel over a ravishing girl named Francesca and spared his life on condition that he never see her again. Now the duke has taken Francesca as his wife and intercepted a love letter from her to his old rival. Rather than kill Casanova on the spot, he makes him a startling offer, one that is logical, perverse, and irresistible. Turning an historical episode into a dazzling fictional exploration of the clasp of desire and death, Casanova in Bolzano is further proof that S ndor M rai is one of the most distinctive voices of the twentieth century.

The Rebels

Embers…
Casanova in Bolzano…
and now The Rebels: the third of the rediscovered novels of the great Hungarian writer the jolting story of a troubled group of young men on the cusp of life, and death, in World War I. It is the summer of 1918. As graduation approaches at a boys academy in provincial Hungary, the senior class finds itself in a ghost town. Fathers, uncles, older brothers all have been called to the front. Surrounded only by old men, mothers, aunts, and sisters, the boys are keenly aware that graduation will propel them into the army and imminently toward likely death on the battlefield. In the final weeks of the academic year, four of these young men and the war wounded older brother of one of them are drawn tightly together, sensing in one another a mutual alienation from their bleak, death mapped future. Soon they are acting out their frustrations and fears in a series of increasingly serious, strange, and subversive games and petty thefts. But when they attract the attention of a stranger in town an actor with a traveling theater company their games, and their lives, begin to move in a direction they could not have predicted and cannot control.

Esther’s Inheritance

What is it to be in love with a pathological liar and fantasist? Esther is, and has been for more than twenty years. Lajos, the liar, married her sister, and when she died, Lajos disappeared. Or did he? And Esther? She was left with her elderly cousin, the all knowing Nunu, and a worn old house, living a life of the most modest comforts. All is well, but all is tired.

Until a telegram arrives announcing that, after all these years, Lajos is returning with his children. The news brings both panic and excitement. While no longer young and thoroughly skeptical about Lajos and his lies, Esther still remembers how incredibly alive she felt when he was around. Lajos’s presence bewitches everyone, and the greatest part of his charm and his danger lies in the deftness with which he wields that delicate power. Nothing good can come of this: friends rally round, but Lajos s arrival, complete with entourage, begins a day of high theater.

Esther s Inheritance has the taut economy of M rai s Embers, and presents a remarkable narrator who delivers the story as both tragedy and comedy on an intimate scale that nevertheless has archetypal power.

Portraits of a Marriage

A rediscovered masterwork from the famed Hungarian novelist S ndor M rai, Portraits of a Marriage is in fact a startling exploration of a triangle of entanglement.A wealthy couple in bourgeois society, Peter and Ilonka appear to enjoy a fine union. Their home is tastefully decorated; their clothes are well tailored; they move in important circles. And yet, to hypersensitive Ilonka, her choice in d cor is never good enough, and her looks are never fair enough to fully win the love of her husband, who has carried with him a secret that has long tormented him: Peter is in love with Judit, a peasant and servant in his childhood home. For Judit, however, even Peter’s affection cannot transcend that which she loves most the prospect of her own freedom and a future without the constraints of the society that has ensnared all three in a vortex of love and loss. Set against the backdrop of Hungary between the wars, Portraits of a Marriage offers further posthumous evidence of M rai s neglected brilliance Chicago Tribune and his exquisite, acutely observed evocations of sacrifice and longing.