Alta Ifland's Blog: Notes on Books - Posts Tagged "hungary"
Sándor Márai’s Portraits of a Marriage (Trans. from the Hungarian by George Szirtes, Knopf, 2011)
I had read Embers, The Rebels, Memoir of Hungary, Esther’s Inheritance, and the French edition of The Confessions of a Bourgeois (the English version is yet to come) by Márai, and I am a big admirer of his, but I didn’t expect to be so impressed by Portraits of a Marriage, his latest novel in English, released early this year by Knopf in George Szirtes’s outstanding translation. How should I put this? Portraits of a Marriage is a masterpiece. Portraits of a Marriage is one of the greatest 20th century novels. Portraits of a Marriage is a work whose psychological finesse equals that of Proust. Portraits of a Marriage has some of the most subtle socio-political observations I have encountered on Europe’s (dying) bourgeois society and post-war American society. This is, by the way, the only book by Márai in which he tackles—albeit briefly—the subject of America, the country where he lived in exile for about forty years. And finally, Portraits of a Marriage is a novel about the nature of romantic love written with the raw lucidity one finds only in Tolstoy or Stefan Zweig.
The novel has four parts, each in a different voice: Ilonka’s—the wife of a very wealthy man, who tries to unveil her husband’s secret; Peter’s—the husband secretly in love with his mother’s servant; Judit’s—the servant who has grown up (literally) in a ditch, and who will one day marry the Master (i.e., Peter); Ede’s—Judit’s last lover in Rome (where she lives in exile after the Communists come to power in Hungary), a drummer turned bartender in New York.
Although each part is very captivating, the best is, probably, Judit’s confession. It is the most intelligent analysis of bourgeois culture I have ever read, written from the perspective of an outsider, which makes it sound at times like an anthropological study. This analysis is all the more extraordinary since Márai identified strongly as a “bourgeois,” that is, as belonging to a culture entirely destroyed by the Communist regime.
If you read only one novel this year, read this!Portraits of a Marriage
The novel has four parts, each in a different voice: Ilonka’s—the wife of a very wealthy man, who tries to unveil her husband’s secret; Peter’s—the husband secretly in love with his mother’s servant; Judit’s—the servant who has grown up (literally) in a ditch, and who will one day marry the Master (i.e., Peter); Ede’s—Judit’s last lover in Rome (where she lives in exile after the Communists come to power in Hungary), a drummer turned bartender in New York.
Although each part is very captivating, the best is, probably, Judit’s confession. It is the most intelligent analysis of bourgeois culture I have ever read, written from the perspective of an outsider, which makes it sound at times like an anthropological study. This analysis is all the more extraordinary since Márai identified strongly as a “bourgeois,” that is, as belonging to a culture entirely destroyed by the Communist regime.
If you read only one novel this year, read this!Portraits of a Marriage
Notes on Books
Book reviews and occasional notes and thoughts on world literature and writers by an American writer of Eastern European origin.
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