Authors: Sandor Marai
B000FBJF64 EBOK (18 page)
“Now you may hang it up again.”
“Yes,” says the nurse.
“It’s of no importance anymore.”
“I know.”
“Good night, Nini.”
“Good night.”
The nurse stands up on tiptoe, lifts her little hand with the yellowed skin lying in creases over the bones, and traces the sign of the cross on the old man’s forehead. They give each other a kiss. It’s an awkward, brief, odd kiss, and if anyone were there to see it, it would provoke a smile. But like every kiss, this one is an answer, a clumsy but tender answer to a question that eludes the power of language.
INTERNATIONAL ACCLAIM FOR SANDOR MARAI’S
Embers
“Tantalizing. . . . Brilliant. . . . [Márai’s] words resonate.”
—The Wall Street Journal
“Twentieth-century literature . . . has received the posthumous gift of a new master, whom in the future we will rank with Josef Roth, Stefan Zweig, Robert Musil, and even our other lost demigods, Thomas Mann and Franz Kafka. His name is Sándor Márai.”
—Die Zeit
“This major European novelist not only anatomizes brilliantly one triangular relationship from the old Austro-Hungarian Empire, he also captures the pandemonium of all human relationships: the smoldering embers of our feelings, of lust, love, revenge, and hate. It is wonderful, and a masterpiece.”
—Der Spiegel
“An extraordinary and beautiful novel . . . perfectly rendered into English by Carol Brown Janeway. Márai asks and examines big questions: about friendship, love, courage. . . . One is grateful to have been introduced to a novelist of such rare and delightful gifts.”
—The Scotsman
“A masterpiece. [Márai’s] return to the literary fold is a matter for worldwide celebration. . . .
Embers
is one of those apparently simple novels which stays in the memory long after it has been put down. . . . Rediscovering Márai is like finding an old master painting in the attic.”
—Sunday Telegraph
“An extraordinary novel. Elegiac, somber, musical and gripping,
Embers
is a brilliant disquisition on friendship, one of the most ambitious in literature. An immensely wise book.”
—The Observer
(London)
“A classic. Magnificent. A spellbinding piece of narration driven by intense passion. No one builds and sustains suspense better.”
—The Times
(London)
“A strangely arresting work, the kind of book you have never quite read before. The story, intensely human, works beautifully, both as a rumination on past time and as a novel of suspense. . . . It is a thrill to read something so startlingly original.”
—Evening Standard
“Beautifully realized. Somber, measured, mutedly passionate and peculiarly compelling.
Embers
conveys a sense of authentic passion, authentic pain.” —John Banville,
Irish Times
SANDOR MARAI
Embers
Sándor Márai was born in Kassa, in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in 1900, and died in San Diego in 1989. He rose to fame as one of the leading literary novelists in Hungary in the 1930s. Profoundly antifascist, he survived World War II, but persecution by the Communists drove him from the country in 1948, first to Italy, then to the United States. He is the author of a body of work now being rediscovered and which Knopf is translating into English.
A NOTE ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
Carol Brown Janeway’s translations include Binjamin Wilkomirski’s
Fragments,
Marie de Hennezel’s
Intimate Death,
Bernhard Schlink’s
The Reader,
Jan Philipp Reemtsma’s
In the Cellar,
Hans-Ulrich Treichel’s
Lost,
Zvi Kolitz’s
Yosl Rakover Talks to God,
and Benjamin Lebert’s
Crazy.
FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION,
SEPTEMBER 2002
Translation copyright © 2001 by Carol Brown Janeway
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. This translation originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2001.
Originally published as
A gyertyák csonkig égnek
in Budapest, Hungary, in 1942. Reprinted by Helikon Kiado, Budapest, in 1990.
Copyright © Heirs of Sándor Márai. Vörösvary-Weller Publishing, Toronto.
This edition translated from the German-language work
Die Glut,
published by Piper Verlag GmbH, Munich, in 1999.
Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage International and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:
Márai, Sándor, 1900–1989.
[A gyertyák csonkig égnek. English]
Embers / Sándor Márai ; translated by Carol Brown Janeway.
p. cm.
I. Janeway, Carol Brown. II. Title.
ph3281.m35 g94 2001
894′.511334—dc21 2001029864
Vintage
www.vintagebooks.com
eISBN: 978-1-4000-7774-8
v3.0