One’s life, viewed as a whole, is always the answer to the most important questions. Along the way, does it matter what one says, what words and principles one chooses to justify oneself? At the very end, one’s answers to the questions the world has posed with such relentlessness are to be found in the facts of one’s life.
Sándor Márai – Embers
The moment a bond is formed, a fragment of one’s self inevitably needs to surrender and die; the fragment of one’s self that makes it such an excruciating experience when the most elusive of realities – the bond of souls – is obliterated, thrown across the threshold into the past.
In a castle at the foot of the Carpathian Mountains, an old General awaits a guest, once a lifelong friend, whom he has not seen for forty-one years. Almost as if following the threads on a faded tapestry, their long conversation spanning a single night, resembling a tense and tiring duel of words and silences, will gradually weave the story of a past so softly veiled in mysteries like the morning mists gathering about the forests of the castle. Three silhouettes emerge from their depths, and three lives, bound by love, friendship and fate, find themselves once again, with the benefit of hindsight, coming to crossroads that will with the very same precision divide them forever.
He stood motionless at the window, arms crossed over his chest, looking out at the landscape, the valley, the forest, the yellow road far below, the distant outline of the town. His farsighted eyes picked up the movement of a steadily advancing carriage. His guest was en route. Face expressionless, body motionless, he followed the rapidly moving target. Then he closed one eye as a hunter does when taking aim.
Sándor Márai – Embers
Reading the slender masterwork of the prolific Hungarian writer Sándor Márai almost in one sitting on the eve of my state exam from internal medicine (which, admittedly, was not a very good idea), I realized it had been a very long time since I had had the exquisite pleasure of being so very taken by a book that I would simply forget how quickly time passes by; Sándor Márai’s deftly crafted plot and the splendour of his storytelling prowess left me hanging on his silently moving lips. Embers is not simply a jewel of lush writing and spell-binding atmosphere, it is also a novel of profound psychological insight where the subtle nuances of friendship, love, hatred, jealousy and envy bring to life a chain of powerful, poetic observations, creating a story of memorable impact. Where precisely does the delicate line separating love from hatred lie, the line beyond which trust is broken forever?
And all the others, with flowers in their hair, circling past in a dance, scattering blossoms, notes, ribbons, and long gloves in their wake. These women had brought the intoxication of love’s first adventures into their lives, and with it all its companions: desire, jealousy, and the struggle with loneliness. And yet, beyond their roles and their lives in society, beyond the women, something else, something more powerful made itself felt. A feeling known only to men. A feeling called friendship.
Sándor Márai – Embers
I remember how, as a little girl, I used to climb up the old, creaking stairs into the attic of my grandparents’ country house where my grandmother, as a former librarian, used to store all her precious gems from her youth. I would steal away under the cloak of evening from family conversations and sit up there in the cold room all alone under the dim lights, eyes wide open, reverently touching, as though in a religious ritual, the thick binding of the books smelling of dust and history, names and titles engraved upon the worn out backs that I so loved to caress in my hands. I recall stumbling across the name of Sándor Márai more than once, and given he was born in what is now the second largest city in Slovakia, barely an hour drive’s away from my grandparents’ country house, and is still very popular in that particular region of my native country, it does not come across as particularly surprising that I should have made myself familiar with yet another personage of classic world literature. What surprises me, however, is that Márai’s name never triumphed on the long list of books that I carried away, with an innocent smile, in my holiday knapsack when my summer adventures had ended and it was time to return back home. The silent purge of my grandmother’s library was all too evident, yet when her loving reproaches came, I was generous enough to solemnly promise that I would never take away completely everything.
It was the moment that separates night from day, the underworld from the world above. And perhaps other things separate themselves out, too. It is the last second, when the depths and heights, the dark and the light, of the world and of men still brush against each other, when sleepers waken with a start from troubling dreams, when the sick begin to groan because they sense that the nightly hell is nearing its end and now the more distinct pain will begin again. Light and the natural ordering that accompanies the day will separate and tease out the layers of desire, the secret longings, the twitches of excitement that had been tangled in the darkness of the night.
Sándor Márai – Embers
Embers transported me back in time and touched me on more levels than I can express; the mastery of Márai’s writing makes for an atmospheric journey through time and space, through hearts broken and betrayed, through an Empire that succumbed at the turning of a new century, through times of dazzling lights refracted on the polished marble floors of ball rooms where the world, as it once had been, danced its last waltz to the melodic waves of Strauss’s Blue Danube. Like all eras sentenced to doom, this one, too, carried an air of swan-like gracefulness, an intense beauty akin to the last flames of a fire before it fizzles out, leaving at the bottom of the hearth embers emanating a steady, slowly dying glow.
So, too, all passions of the story die by the time the night is over – leaving behind an afterglow of love and friendship that rose and fell like the great Empire.
L'art de subtilité 