![]() ![]() At the close, a dozing Esther, who has neglected to install electric lighting, finds an "end-of-September wind" tearing open the window and snuffing out the candle. "Wake up, Esther!" Nunu scolds her for refusing to accept that Lajos swapped her mother's jewelled heirloom for a fake ring. In his heroine's trance-like capitulation, it is tempting to see a larger drama of mesmerised masses, swindled of their inheritance by charismatic fraudsters with false promises, sleepwalking into disaster. Throughout the war, Márai opposed the Nazis and their fascist allies in Hungary's authoritarian regime (his wife was Jewish). especially a highly sensitive woman - indeed, whole crowds, even masses".Įsther's Inheritance was first published in 1939. Rereading the "false-truth" of Lajos's love letters, Esther marvels at their "power enough to move anyone. In a satirical flourish, Lajos's crooked entourage steal even the jam. Márai's novella offers the naked spectacle of the strong-willed subduing the weaker-willed, for all the complex goodness of the latter and transparent falsity of the former. It is the only respect in which you achieve greatness." Esther is persuaded that "we women cannot be wise and rational" in the same way as men, and that, had she been brave, she would have eloped with Lajos "my sister's fiancé, Lajos the swindler, the notorious liar". He claims that it falls to women to be supreme in love: "We did not love each other courageously enough. Ultimately, Esther is not so much deceived as overcome. To his daughter Eva, Lajos "never remembers reality" because he is a poet, while for the drily sensible Nunu, he is "a man to whom one must give. The recurrent images are of theatricality, fakery and role-playing. There is a curious inevitability in the heroine's readiness to be taken in again. Yet she also learns that her comfort has been ensured by the faithful suitors she rejected.īound within Esther's narrative, the novella is strangely enigmatic. "Everything he touches instantly becomes a fake."Įsther's hopes that he had returned to put things right give way to revelations of familial treachery, a brother's possessive jealousy, a sister's envy, letters intercepted and hidden. He brings his two children, the "shifty, sluggish" Gabor and the "little Madam" Eva, among other venal hangers-on, and turns out to be a tawdry conjuror doing magic tricks, a rope-climbing fakir who disappears into the clouds, only to reappear with a begging bowl. He is scarcely out of his shiny red car before he asks for a loan. ![]() When Lajos sends a telegram announcing his arrival, she dons her violet dress of 20 years earlier - only, she says at the outset, to be robbed for the last time.Ī man who "lied the way the wind howls, with a certain natural energy, in high spirits", Lajos had absconded owing money, and even his telegram is "like an opera libretto, just as theatrical, as dangerously childish and false". Esther has survived on the bequest of her father's house and garden, though rather than being healed by time, the "wound scabbed over". Esther, an unmarried woman in her late 40s, has lived with poor relation Nunu since Lajos, "the only man I ever loved", jilted her some 20 years before for her now-dead sister, Vilma. Like Embers, the novella recounts a dramatically charged meeting after a gap of decades, and it has a similarly intricate symbolism and openness to interpretation. Unlike Embers - rushed into English from the German translation - Esther's Inheritance, an earlier novella, has thankfully been translated directly from the Hungarian by the poet George Szirtes. Since Roberto Calasso championed Embers as a lost masterpiece in 1998, four of Márai's novels have become available in English. In obscurity in California, he shot himself in 1989 without witnessing the fall of communism or the rediscovery of his work. B orn in 1900, Sándor Márai wrote 46 books before he fled communist Hungary in 1948.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |