Tag: Hungarian Literature

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.

Satantango Review – False Hopes and False Prophets

I finished Satantango, by the Hungarian author László Krasznahorkai (in George Szirtes’ superb translation), yesterday and am still reeling from the experience. Really, I had been reeling from the first pages onwards. This is the best book, the most exciting book, the most challenging book, that I have read in a long time. The only book by a living author I can compare it to without understating my admiration would be Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. Both works are bleak and challenging meditations on apocalypse, on the state of humanity at the very edge of collapse. But even to compare it to Blood Meridian detracts from Satantango’s own unique and demonic magic. I’ve really read nothing like it before. It creates, in form and structure and plot, a completely new world.

So far Satantango is most famous for its 7ish hour film adaptation by Béla Tarr – naturally enough, since the translation was only published in 2012. I myself haven’t seen the film though – I actually came across the book and its author while browsing in Waterstones for something by Kazantzakis (my review of Zorba the Greek is here) and the really nice editions of Krasznahorkai’s works elsewhere in the “K” section caught my eye. From that I drew near enough for my short-sighted self to be able to see the titles, and I was immediately excited by The Melancholy of Resistance, and read the first page since I had time to spare. The prose, with its winding sentences and no paragraph breaks, put me off – especially since the book was already four hundred or so pages long. I put the book back, noted the author’s name, and bought myself Zorba the Greek as I had planned.

Once I had finished that, though, I went to the college library and gave Krasznahorkai a second chance. The only book there was Satantango, so I no longer had a say in the matter. I took it home with me for this Easter break.

Picture of László Krasznahorkai

László Krasznahorkai (b. 1954) has a rather devilishly mysterious look about him, and his Satantango is devilishly good too, even if its world is bleak.

Introduction – An Easter Story

As luck, or fate, or something else entirely would have it, Satantango is something of an Easter work. It begins, at least, with a resurrection. News of the return of two men, Irimiás and his helper Petrina, who were thought dead for over a year, interrupts the bickering over money going on between two men living in the small “Estate” where much of Satantango’s action takes place. These two resurrected men (the second chapter is entitled “We are resurrected”) have a reputation for their skill and adeptness in making money, and the bickerers decide to try to track them down, and in doing so see if they could make themselves some cash for their troubles. The other chapters of the first half of the book flit between the different major characters of the village, from the doctor to the schoolmaster, the local prostitutes to the barman, and detail their own reactions to the news. Gradually, they all converge upon the bar, the central location of the Estate, and there they begin to drink and dance, while they await the arrival of the man, Irimiás, who they all take to be their saviour.

The World and its Inhabitants

Krasznahorkai does an excellent job creating the tense atmosphere of a tiny village. In the first half of the book, characters of each chapter rarely meet those of other chapters, but through a process of endlessly layering more and more references to their names and personalities, Satantango gives the impression of a living, breathing community, so that when we do finally meet a given character, we’ve already heard all the gossip, and meet them as we would an old friend or enemy. There’s Mrs Halics, the most religious of the townsfolk, but a hypocrite at heart; Mrs Schmidt, promiscuous towards half the village but longing most of all for another night with Irimiás; and Futaki, the gloomy, melancholic sceptic with a limp. And many other characters, in both senses of the word, besides.

These people, trapped in an Estate whose owners are nowhere to be found, whose machinery no longer works, and whose business and industry has long-since departed, are in desperate need of some kind of salvation. Hopeless schemes for making money or getting away are made and fail by the second. In the first chapter alone Futaki and another man decide to betray a third, but only because Futaki caught the first man before he could betray him instead. Mrs Schmidt’s infidelity to her husband is only one of the many betrayals of a people who quite literally live in the mud. A recurring image in Satantango is the slaughterhouse, where people are merely meat. The first part of the book is in many ways a catalogue of the seven deadly sins of a fallen people: very few people here have any kind of positivity or goodness about them, for better or worse, which can add to the heaviness and challenge of reading through.

Style – Mud on the Page

But the main challenge when it comes to reading is that like The Melancholy of Resistance, Satantango is written in what I take to be Krasznahorkai’s signature style. There are no paragraph breaks, and sentences are long, intricate things. At first it was hard to read, but then I grew used to it. The whole book has a flowing, heavy quality to it, like mud. The decay and purification of the environment that the characters live in – nobody cleans, and cockroaches and other insects are constantly waging war for new territory – is marked by a similar decay in the prose. We sense that sentiment, expressed by Beckett at the end of The Unnamable, that “you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on”, in the way that the only thing that seems to be carrying on the prose is the way that the character haven’t died yet and that somewhere, misplaced though it may be, they have their hope.

It is difficult to tell where their hope should be placed, if indeed it should be placed anywhere. The novel has a strange, unnerving, supernatural side to it. It begins with bells, ringing even though there are no churches nearby, and that stop as suddenly as they start. But it is only some characters who seem to be able to hear them, which adds another layer of confusion. Elsewhere, in the bar, invisible spiders cover everything in cobwebs at a miraculous speed. And then, in the second part, Irimiás himself sees something that he cannot possibly explain rationally, try as he might. The novel’s chapter titles only add to the confusion, with part II’s chapter IV being titled “Heavenly Vision? Hallucination?” – nothing is given to us as a certainty.

Irimiás – The prophet the townsfolk need… or the one they deserve?

The character Irimiás, the resurrected one, inevitably forms the centre of any discussion of hope in the novel. It is he who, like a spider, literally brings together all of the major characters into the bar as if stuck in his web, and then disperses them as the novel goes on. He is a strange figure. Many characters see him as their saviour, and there are further parallels with Jesus too. He has two personal followers, Petrina and a boy, Sanyi, who go with him everywhere and do as he says. Petrina even confuses “Evangelical” with “evangelist” when describing himself. Yet if he is a god or even a kind of Christian, he is a strange one. When he speaks, it is rarely to espouse a Christian viewpoint. At the beginning of part II he gives a long speech, exhorting the townsfolk to repent and do better, but their response, privately, is just to assume he is joking. When he encounters the supernatural in part II he dismisses it, and God too, as unreal. His views are more likely a bleak nihilism of the sort he shows when alone with his closest followers, dismissing all hope and everything else: “we are trapped forever. We’re properly doomed. It’s best not to try either, best not believe your eyes.” Indeed, his nihilism is so great that he dismisses his senses rather than believe something. “We think we’re breaking free but all we’re doing is readjusting the locks.” And yet, he leads the townsfolk out into a wilderness; he gives them, all the same, a hope; he helps them. It’s hard to say why that might be. Harder still to know what to think when there are hints, in the background, of him stockpiling arms and munitions. He remains, even after finishing Satantango, an enigma.

Part of the reason that he is not closer to a traditional view of Jesus is that it seems a traditional Jesus is far from what the townsfolk, Mrs Halics excepted, actually want. Ultimately, it seems like almost all of their problems are due to money, or rather its absence. The girls who are forced into prostitution, are after money to pay for their mother, who refuses to work. The early scheming and betrayal of Futaki and Schmidt that takes place in the first chapter all hinges on trying to get enough money to escape. The barman obsesses about money too. And in this vein Irimiás, who is famous at least partially for being able to make money anywhere, also has his place. It is he who is hated by the barman precisely for his past debts (before his “death” Irimiás drank a huge amount without paying). That is to say, of all the characters, Irimiás is immune to money – he alone doesn’t need to pay it. He, indeed, has somehow transcended it.

The Politics of Negligence

There is also a political angle to the work. Published originally in Hungary in 1985, Krasznahorkai himself said that it was a miracle it made it past the censor given the political content of the work . But the politics of the text is not immediately apparent. These people, after all, are locked off in their Estate, and apart from their names there’s little indication that the work takes place in Hungary at all. But politics comes in as soon as we start asking questions. Why has the Estate fallen into decay? Because state support for the machinery needed for local industry has dried up. The cultural centre has also lost its funding and is in a state of disrepair. There is no longer a school for the headmaster to teach at. The depression and desperation of the citizens is an implicit critique on the system that has left them in this state – not of authoritarianism as bad and negligent governance in general. Anywhere where people are left behind, whether it be rural Hungary or my own native North-West Scotland, might see itself reflected in these pages. And in this context, Irimiás’ hints of weapons buying take on a more sinister note. It may well be that what the man is planning is revolution.

The ending of Satantango only complicates matters. I shan’t spoil it here, but it is one of those endings which makes the entirety of the material up to that point take on a new light, but not in a way that cheapens it. I was left sitting there, overpowered by the implications, for long after I’d closed the book at last. It’s rare that an ending does that to me. And I think when I eventually go back and read the book again, there will be a lot of new things for me to discover.

Conclusion

I loved Satantango because for me, it was one of those books that reveal our conceptions of what literature can and can’t do are limited, and show us the way forward. I feel like others must have felt when Kafka first emerged from Prague into the rest of the world and reshaped a world’s literature. Well, maybe Krasznahorkai isn’t that good – after only one novel it’s too early for me to say – but he certainly has already had a real and tangible effect on me. Satantango showed me a way of writing about serious things seriously, in a way that wasn’t preachy or boringly ironical. It may well be bleak, but it is also terribly, awesomely, sincere. And sincerity never hurts the message.

For more doom and gloom, check out my reviews of Andrei Platonov’s Soul and Other Stories, or Varlam Shalamov’s time in the Gulag. If, on the other hand, you’re in need of some cheeriness and affirmation, my review of Zorba the Greek is here.

Photo of László Krasznahorkai by Lenke Szilágyi [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)]