Trying New Things to Keep an Active Mind: My Introduction to the Hungarian Writer, Sandor Marai By Orlando Bartro
I was introduced to the writing of Sándor Márai through the gift of a stranger.
I had bought an obscure classic on e-bay, and the seller included not only my purchase but Márai’s novel, The Candles Burnt to Stumps, also known as Embers, with a brief note “You ought to have this, too.”
The novel stayed on my bookshelf for ten years before I finally read it last week.
Anyone who enjoys classic fiction ought to become acquainted with Sándor Márai.
He was borpersecution ande Austrian Hungarian Empire, survived World War Two, endured communist persecution, and died in San Diego in 1989.
The Candles Burnt to Stumps has much of the elegiac historical detail and elegance of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s The Leopard and Joseph Roth’s Radetzky March; but is more concise than either, more suspenseful, and more ingeniously structured.
Márai has Chekhov’s gift for evoking an entire scene with a line:
“Snow kept falling, and coachmen drove pairs of lovers silently through the white air.”
* Orlando Bartro is the author of Toward Two Words, a comical & surreal novel about a man who finds yet another woman he never knew, usually available at Amazon for $4.91.