Embers

“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 recognize that this wisdom is not going to earn us any praise, that life is not going to pin a medal on us for recognizing and enduring our own vanity or egoism or baldness or our potbelly. 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.” – The General, the protagonist in Sándor Márai’s Embers

Embers by Hungarian author Sándor Márai (translated into English by Carol Brown Janeway) is a grand novel. It centres on an elderly General and his invited guest one night in the General’s grand mansion in an estate in Hungary where he has been living in a self-imposed exile for years. The story unfolds slowly and we realise that this meeting with the guest has been long-planned by the General in a sinister sort of way. A dark foreboding immediately fills the reader’s mind, but Sándor Márai quickly takes us to a backstory of the General’s life.

We are introduced to the General (Henrik), his childhood friend (Konrad) who is a fellow officer who mysteriously disappears some 40 years earlier, the General’s brooding relationship with his beautiful beloved culturally-absorbed wife (Krisztina), the distance that grows slowly between the General and his wife, and the deception acted out together by his wife and his friend which torments him for 40 long years. The General suffers this patiently; but the torment of deception by his wife and friend burns in his heart long after his wife has passed away.

Then everything changes for the General almost magically when a letter announces the arrival of his long-lost friend, leading to the night of the meeting, the dinner and the General’s interrogation of his friend. This is where our story had begun and this is where our story concludes, bringing our foreboding to its climax. There is a lot of talk by the General, and even more reflection of one’s life filled with disappointments and sadness.

[Citation: Embers by Sándor Márai (trans. Carol Brown Janeway).]