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Burning to the Last – Sándor Márai’s Embers

Sándor Márai’s Embers is the second work of Hungarian literature that I’ve read after Satantango, but I’m not quite sure whether “Hungarian” is the best word for describing this short novel of ageing and decline. For though Embers was published in 1942, its attention is focused back towards the past, when Márai’s country (he was born in 1900) was Austria-Hungary and not the dislocated Hungary it became after the Treaty of Trianon. The sheer nostalgia for a Vienna that once was, for a life that once was, is unmistakable. Márai had even once considered writing in German instead of Hungarian, in the same way that Kafka, another citizen of an empire that disappeared, felt compelled to choose between Czech and German. They made different choices, but a common sensibility, a common heritage, ties them, and Hofmannsthal, and Rilke, and so many others, together. They were once all Austro-Hungarians.

Sándor Márai (1900-1989), only recently was “discovered” by the literary establishment, but his incorporation is in full swing. Embers is his most famous work, it seems.

The Plot of Embers

In the castle there lives an old general. The General (his name – Henrik – we learn later, but the sheer formality and seriousness by which he lives means that the text rarely refers to him by it) lives with his servants, chief among them Nini, a 91-year-old who once served as his nanny and wet nurse. He has lived, almost without any contact with the outside world, for many years. People come to his estate to hunt in the expansive grounds, but they stay in the hunting lodge and do not see the master. The general’s wife died young, and his only friend disappeared 41 years ago. His life is one of looking back. We are told early on that “he thought only in decades, anything more exact upset him, as if he might be reminded of things he would rather forget”.

But the things that we wish to forget are often the things that keep us going. The novel begins when the General’s peace is at last disrupted by a letter, informing him that this friend will be coming for dinner that evening. The scene is set for a walk through the past, an untangling of confused memories, and a working out of something akin to the truth. But when life is almost at its end it is precisely truth, hazy and unpredictable, that can be the most valuable thing in the world.

The original title of Embers, A gyertyák csonkig égnek, is literally translated as “Candles burn until the end”. And indeed, most of the story takes place by the fire, and each chapter mimics the slow decline of life as the red glow grows dim, before finally going out. At first the General and his friend deal with their common past in the military academy and service, both in dialogue and in reminiscences, but with time they move ever closer to the present, and to the questions that have been tormenting the General for all those years that they were parted. These questions, as he himself says, are perhaps what have been giving him the strength to stay alive all this time.

Male Friendship

It is a friendship that needs to be worked out. Konrad, the returning friend, tried – the General is sure of it – to kill the General on the day of a hunt, 41 years before the novel takes place. He tried to do this, perhaps, because of a secret relationship with the General’s wife. The day after the hunt Konrad disappeared and the General’s wife ceased talking with him. The General wants to understand what happened, and why, but as the one-sided interrogation is carried out by the fire – Konrad almost never speaks, even to defend himself – we get the strange feeling that the General is trying to save himself, just as much as he’s trying to save his friendship.

The novel is unusual in the focus it lays upon friendship, particularly male friendship. I can’t think of many other books that do so. Destructive forces, even love, always seem to take precedence over the banalities and subtleties of friendship when it comes to novels. No doubt because they’re much more dramatic. But friendship is an important topic, even if it’s one that is already in a way outdated in the way we encounter it in Embers. The two kids meet at a military academy, where they spend every day and night together. And though they have different backgrounds – Konrad is poor, while Henrik is wealthy – and share different worldviews – Henrik is martial and serious, while Konrad loves music – the friendship that springs up seems built to last forever.

The intensity of the arrangement is hard to understand for people who haven’t experienced something similar. I’m lucky, perhaps, in that I went to boarding school, and know the sort of thing Márai describes here. Of course, many of my friends were friends only through common experience, a weak bond; but for those friends who were friends for deeper reasons, the length of time we spent together means that even now, when we are all separated and scattered across the world, we remain close in a way that is hard to describe.

Friendship’s Decline

The General and his friend’s relationship is both the second sort, and not. Certainly, at first glance the friendship between the two of them seems to rely only on common experience. But that’s not true – there is a sense that they also have a shared internal world, which even though their interests are mismatched is nonetheless enough to bond them tightly. They make vows of chastity, and promise other monkish feats. The problem is that as time passes divisions between them grow, and what was once unimportant becomes unavoidable and painful.

Chief among these divisions is the problem of money. Though Konrad is at the prestigious military academy and a nobleman, he is there only because his parents are starving themselves for his sake. He says that whenever he spends money he is “expending a portion of their lives”, and though Henrik tries to understand this, their difference in backgrounds grows harder to bear. Henrik lacks the imagination for understanding – he is a military man. And once the two finish at the academy and start working, stationed near Vienna, their differing sensibilities become a further obstruction to understanding. Henrik goes carousing and lives the life of a young officer. Konrad, delicate and musical, cannot. And though he feigns indifference, “one could hear in his voice the need of a thirsty man yearning to drain life dry”. With time such feelings only get worse.

Music is also another point where the boys’ divisions are obvious. Henrik doesn’t understand music. He feels cut off from Konrad whenever the other listens. But for Konrad music is liberation: “When he listened to music, he listened with his whole body, as longingly as a condemned man in his cell aches for the sound of distant feet”. Music connects Konrad with Chopin, who is mentioned several times in the book as a figure of mixed identity, having a French father and Polish mother. Konrad and the General’s wife are both artistic and uncertain in their origins. Unsurprisingly, an affair forms, and it is for that reason that Konrad may have wanted to kill his friend.

End of an Era – Closed Spaces and the Politics of Embers

Embers takes place not long before its publication in 1942. But war is hard to hear through the castle’s walls. One thing I noticed early on is the use of space in the novel. The General’s world is one of closed spaces. He is out of touch with the times. In this he is very reminiscent of Stevens in The Remains of the Day. Just as Stevens (unknowingly) hides within Darlington Hall to avoid facing a world that has changed, so too does the General in the castle. He looks at portraits from the past and thinks of how good things were – “absolutely dedicated to honour, to the male virtues: silence, solitude, the inviolability of one’s word”. Yet he also keeps most of the castle closed down, unvisited, to avoid facing the memories locked within those rooms. And though he hunts, he never leaves the estate.

A castle from Hungary
A castle in Hungary. I liked Embers’ use of closed spaces to show both the isolation of the General, and his attempts to keep his homeland alive inside him. Photo by Puffancs CC BY-SA 2.5 HU

Like Stevens, he relies on silence to deceive himself. “Everything… had fed into his very bloodstream the tendency never to speak of whatever caused him pain but to bear it in silence”. Even his friendship with Konrad is described as “hermetic”. For Henrik the Austro-Hungarian Empire has not ended because within his own person – in the values he chooses to embrace – he can keep it alive, and because within his castle he can believe it still is safe. As much as he wants answers from the past, it’s seems more to complete a picture of it than to change the present.

Konrad is almost the exact opposite of the General in all this. His music serves to break down barriers. Music, of course, is a universal language. It connects him first to the General’s mother, herself a Frenchwoman, and then to the General’s wife. Only the General and his father cannot understand it – their focus is on the physical, rather than the sublime. When Konrad disappeared, he moved to England, and from there to the tropics to serve in the Empire. He doesn’t seem to have any loyalty to his past country. But he has come back. The General says this is because their friendship has remained strong, even through the years of separation. That’s true. But it’s also true that Konrad is just as trouble as the General is by the past. In his case, by the failure of his relationship with the General’s wife.

For both men, the evening is a way of working out what happened – both are old, and both are ready for the peace that can only, perhaps, be attained by resolving a lasting uncertainty.

Conclusion

Embers is not a long novel. Forty-one years of separation take up little time if all that time is spent in waiting. But though it’s short, it’s densely and beautifully written – hence why I’ve tried to include plenty of quotes. The ideas of friendship, of trying to hold onto the past, are just as relevant today as they were when the book was written, and leave plenty of food for thought. If you can find yourself a copy, it’s well worth the short time it will take you to read it.

The conclusion to Embers is also especially worth pondering. If you’ve read the novel, please do leave a comment, as I’d like to see what others made of it.

Imagination’s Paradise? – Gerald Murnane’s Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs

I read the Australian author Gerald Murnane’s novel The Plains last year, after coming across him in a long feature from the New York Times. The article paints him as an eccentric connoisseur of the imagination; a man who, though he has never left his small home region in Australia, nevertheless creates vast worlds within us, stretching our imagination in ways we hadn’t thought possible. I loved The Plains, though I wasn’t quite sure how to write about it. Although on a basic level it is the story of a man, come to the central plains of Australia to make a film about the place, the novel was really about the way that the simple idea of “the plains”, a central, apparently empty space, can actually contain a complex network of hidden meanings. How it’s much more than meets the eye.

Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs is a collection of essays by Murnane, but even to call them that has its problems. Murnane’s fiction and non-fiction form a continuum, much as do the works of Borges, who Murnane cites as one of his inspirations. But where Borges makes his fictions essay-like and academic, Murnane makes his non-fiction oddly fictional. There is little concrete information here, and what we do read that might be factual never feels very reliable. Instead, what we get out of each of the essays collected in Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs is an invitation into a kind of fugue state in which images melt into other images and our imagination is made child-like and free again.

The Cover of Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs shows a man riding a horse against a background showing a map of Hungary
The cover of Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs shows two of Murnane’s main obsessions – Horse Racing and Hungary. Both of them are discussed within the essays

Murnane has a poet’s sense for the magical potential of everyday objects to open up a world of associations, and the highest praise I can give the collection is to say that having finished it you go out into the world with fresh eyes, with the world itself equally fresh and made newly beautiful. But Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs isn’t without its problems, and a recommendation comes with certain caveats. For the book’s strengths, and its weaknesses, read on.

Spaces and Imagination

The essays in Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs are chronologically ordered, and certain themes and ideas repeat throughout, although in each instance with a slightly different shade. One of the first major themes of the book is that of space, of empty space, and its potential. Murnane recounts in “On the Road to Bendigo: Kerouac’s Australian Life” how, as a child, he used to watch American films. He didn’t get much out of them – the action went too fast for him. Instead, he focused on the things which seemed unchangeable, stable. “The places where nothing seemed to happen.” The great brown vistas that lie behind the horse rider in a Western, for example. And over time Murnane began to fill the scenery, if not with action, then at least with his own ideas. He realised that “the way to understand a place” is “to turn your back on it”. To imagine.

And so Murnane reads Kerouac, and he reads Kerouac’s biographies, but he never boards a plane. Instead, in his head, he creates his own America, pieced together from Kerouac’s writings and those who write about him. If there is something that ties together the various essays of Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs, it is this idea of the way that everything can be a tool for the creation of an inner, imaginary world within us. This has its dangers. Murnane’s infatuation with the imagination comes across almost solipsistic at times. He himself, in “The Breathing Author”, says that he acknowledges other people’s inner existences, but that he can only see other minds and their contents within the space of his own imagination, as a “landscape” his own mind’s “landscape”. While this may be true to how we understand each other, the way he emphasises it rather devalues individual human dignity…

“Stream System” and Associations of Images

Murnane is a mathematical writer. He likes his fictions to conform to shapes, like circles or triangles or whatever. Perhaps his most famous short story, which is also included among the essays here (another example of genre bending), is called “Stream System”. The narrator of the essay/story goes to a place which is marked on the map as “stream system”. This then sets off a chain of memories, thoughts, and associations, which eventually leads him to face repressed memories about his failure to be kind to his own brother, who died young and unloved. It is well done. We circle around the idea of this location on the map, but with each loop (as it were) the meaning of the water system changes, and new images are heaped on top of the old.

And meaning, the metonymic shifting of meaning, is key to Murnane’s whole project. As he writes, “my writing was not an attempt to produce something called “literature” but an attempt to discover meaning”. “Meaning” he later defines as what exists when he can see in his mind a thing “being connected to some other thing or things.” His whole fictional world concerns the creation of connections and meanings. In this, he stands awkwardly alongside postmodern writers like Don Delillo and Thomas Pynchon. Where they see conspiratorial connections in everything, Murnane seeks to connect apparently unrelated things together, finding in this act of connecting the very purpose of his work. It is, perhaps, an altogether more positive idea. Even though it is one that is very much divorced from the world itself.

Writing and its purpose

Murnane wanted to be a poet when he was young. And his writing, even in these essays, has a poetical quality to it. Not in the sense of a rhyme that creeps into the text. Rather, there is a hypnotic quality to Murnane’s rhythm and repetitions that borders the same world of free and childlike imagination that the best poetry does. It is, in a way, incantatory at times. And in Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs there are a lot of details for one who wants to understand how he works. Not only is there the business of the stream system that I’ve mentioned above, but Murnane also quotes approvingly, on the subject of rhythm, the likes of Robert Louis Stevenson – “Each sentence, by successive phrases, shall first come into a kind of knot, and then, after a moment of suspended meaning, solve and clear itself”.

For Murnane, writing is a way of creating meaning between images. But it also has the exorcism-like purpose that it does for other writers – he writes to remove things from himself. “My sentences arise out of images and feelings that haunt me – not always painfully; sometimes quite pleasantly. These images and feelings haunt me until I find the sentences to bring them into this world”. In the same way as Murnane turns other people into imaginations contained within his own imagination, his view of the purpose of literature is similarly unambitious. For him, it never explains anything, rather it simply serves to show “how stupendously complicated everything is”. He isn’t interested in creating living, breathing characters, so much as reflecting a real mind. What that means in practice is that his stories simply aim to make us believe that only his narrators are real. Believing the rest is unimportant.

Hungary, Horse Riding, Idiosyncrasies

Murnane is weird. He loves horse races, imagining decades of races and writing down their details over the course of his life. For him the best literature aspires to the condition of horse racing, and when he reads a good book he imagines it as a rider, approaching the finish on the field. He has never worn sunglasses, has never learned to swim. He has never gone voluntarily into an art gallery. He comes across, on multiple occasions in Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs, as a kind of aesthetic hermit. His influences – Borges, Calvino, Proust, and others – are all idiosyncratic, but with them I have never felt such a conscious retreat from the real world into the imagined one. Murnane often doesn’t seem interested in… well… anything.

Even books seem not to interest him in a serious way – he reads the same old ones over and over. And ultimately, the impression I had at times while I read Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs was not a positive one. We are taken from the world so brutally, so completely, that it’s hard not to miss it. His style itself becomes grating.

One of the biggest disappoints of the book for me was the final essay, “The Angel’s Son: Why I learned Hungarian Late in Life”. It is an exciting premise, but instead of answering it Murnane goes on another walk among past images, reaching the actual subject – Hungarian – very late in the essay. Of course, there are some beautiful turns of phrase – “if an English word or phrase is a pane of clear glass with something called a meaning on its far side, a Hungarian word is a pane of coloured glass. The meaning on the other side of that glass is apparent to me, but I can never be unaware of the rich tints of the glass.” – but that’s what Murnane’s good at. It’s not a surprise.

Even though the essay is in keeping with Murnane’s general style within Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs, I couldn’t help but feel disappointed at the end. When I actually wanted to know something, the whole essay revealed itself to be akin to a construct of smoke and mirrors, and wholly unsatisfactory.

Conclusion

If you want to read Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs my recommendation comes with these warnings. There is almost nothing here, even though the nothingness is beautiful. Murnane’s style is unique, and the experience of being led into a world of the imagination is not without its charms. It’s also certainly true that his appreciation – ironically enough – of the objects of our world as sources of images is capable of leading us into the world, rather than away from it. But Murnane, it is fair to say, is one of those writers who is best sampled a few pages at a time. Reading Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs through within the space of a week, I felt especially keenly the problems of the work. Perhaps it has made me be unfair. Murnane is a unique writer, and certainly worth one’s time, but The Plains is a much more exciting book, and that’s the one I’d start with. If you’ve come across Murnane yourself and have a different view, why not leave a comment? He’s not the most accessible writer, and it may be that I just don’t know how to approach him.

One Year of Mostly About Stories

Mostly About Stories has been going for just over a year, and it’s time for a little retrospective. I started the blog for a few different reasons. I was about to leave Cambridge and spend a year in Russia, and I would be losing the company of my dear friends Sophie and James, both of whom received the brunt of my reading reviews over dinner each day. I wanted to tell somebody – anyone really – about what I was looking at and what I thought of it. A blog has the advantage of eventually creating a little community around it, with regular commentators and a discursive atmosphere. This has not happened with Mostly About Stories yet, but perhaps it will one day.

Another reason was that I wanted to make sure I was writing. My creativity is fickle, but both from a literary and an academic perspective it makes sense for me to be regularly squeezing thoughts and words out of myself. The weekly/fortnightly deadline I set myself was successful in forcing me to write. It also forces me to think, just a little. Another, closely related, advantage is that of the reading I have done, much of it has been from my reading list for the next academic year, so writing about these books serves as a preliminary solidification in my memory of impressions and the early formulation of critical viewpoints.

It is funny how, as I began to see viewers come in, and then eventually began to see one or two of them stay, I started to be concerned about views. Initially I was writing for myself, on the whole. But once I had a little counter, like a budding little “influencer” I came to consider how to boost my popularity. Luckily, that desire is not too dominant. The fact is, if I wanted views I would need to focus on writing “analyses” and “summaries” of my reading list. In the end, the idea of making a small community of like-minded readers is more attractive, and although having some views are important in that – otherwise how will anyone find the blog at all? – a different style and some small degree of quality is more important.

But anyway.

What Went Right; What Went Wrong

So, as far as I understand it, the blog has not done badly in terms of views. After all, who reads these days? As the year went on, I got more and more of them – except for the final months. when university ended and people presumably had better things to do. Now that we are into January, things are picking up again, and I hope that the trend will continue once we get into February proper.

Not a disaster by any stretch. As the year progressed I had slightly more viewers than when I started!

I had a comment too! My review of Satantango had a comment by the translator. This was very exciting, because I’d liked the book a lot. Nonetheless, that’s one comment over the course of an entire year. I’d prefer to have more. Engagement is great, because it makes you – as the author – feel that people are at least reaching the end of your pieces. I have, as I imagine others do also, an instinctive distrust of Google’s Analytics, which although they are very detailed, paint a somewhat depressing view of how long people actually look at things. Or perhaps it’s just that my content isn’t good. Who knows?

The same situation holds true with my subscribers. Or should I say subscriber? The subscription box, much as is with the case with comments, isn’t easy to locate, and I imagine confirming an email subscription takes a lot of effort – I know I’d hardly do it myself. But still, it would be good to have at least one more subscriber, and ideally someone I didn’t actually know in real life.

A Bit of Data

Mostly About Stories is a book blog. I dropped maths as early as I could, and although I like it, nonetheless it is one of my weaker areas. Still. Here are some statistics for you.

In 2019 I had 4635 views from 3336 unique visitors, 2 comments, and 1 subscriber. By the end of the year, in October and November, I was averaging 35 views a day. On my best day I had 96 views – that day was also my birthday, funnily enough – but as most of the views were on my article about Walter Benjamin this seems a simple coincidence. At the time of writing there are 37 posts on the blog, which is pretty good going. I only once took a break between posts of longer than two weeks (my stated schedule in the about page).  

For a book blog this may be good, but probably isn’t. My only real source of data is this page.

Concerning the Writing

Of course, it’s all well and good to look at metrics and think of plans, but really the heart of any blog is its content. Mostly About Stories is dominated, in its views, by my piece on Walter Benjamin’s the Storyteller (see above). Next to that is my translation of Kafka’s Before the Law, and my essay on Gogol’s The Nose. But everything that I’ve written, almost without exception, has had a viewer or two. That makes writing them worthwhile, as it’s often the less well-known things that I’m most excited to share with people.

My favourite pieces on the blog, or at least the ones I feel most proud of, are likely Salvatore Satta’s The Day of Judgement, Svetlana Alexievich’s Second-Hand Time, and Valentin Rasputin’s Money for Maria. I also quite like my translations of Theodor Storm’s poetry.

I do admit that this blog probably lacks a coherent identity. It’s basically just me reading literature, mostly from my reading lists, and writing about it. I quite like the idea, going forward, of being a bit more disciplined with my post lengths. I read somewhere that viewer attention drops off rapidly once a post goes over 1700 words, and I want to make that my target. Something should be not too long, but also sufficiently in-depth as to be interesting. That would be good.

Steps Forward and Goals for 2020

I recently changed the theme of Mostly About Stories. I think it looks better now. It makes the text easier to read and has a bit more of a modern feel to it.

I’d like to have a few more comments, maybe another subscriber, before this year is over. All that would be good. Perhaps I should be like those annoying YouTubers who end every video begging us to like and subscribe? It’s a difficult balance to get and I tend to hope any readers who want to comment will comment without prompting, but perhaps I should try to be a little more pushy?

Anyway, I hope you found this look at one year of Mostly About Stories to be slightly entertaining. Remember to like, subscribe, and leave a comment about how I can improve the blog going forward! 😊