Fear, loss and coming of age in Hungary at end of WWI

A capsule biography of novelist Sandor Marai seems bleak, as most life summaries do when shorn of extras. Born in the small town of Kassa, Hungary, in 1900, the last year of the 19th century, he would be described nowadays as Austro-Hungarian. He began writing at an early age. Anti-fascist, he was often in trouble with the authorities. He fled the Communists in 1948. After a stint in Italy, Marai wound up in the United States, where he grew into Hungary’s most renowned expatriate writer. In San Diego in 1989, the year that Soviet domination was being overthrown in Hungary and across Eastern Europe, he shot himself in the head.

Not until a dozen years later, in a new millennium, did Marai’s work begin to be published in English, to almost universal acclaim. First came “Embers” and then “Casanova in Bolzano.” With “The Rebels,” newly translated by acclaimed Hungarian-born poet George Szirtes, Alfred A. Knopf continues its admirable project of releasing all of Marai’s work in English. His rediscovery has been compared to the unearthing of forgotten treasure.

As in “Embers,” which is mostly a dialogue between two old men discussing a lifetime of hoarded grief over a betrayed friendship, “The Rebels” focuses on a group of male characters. Most of them are talkers too, but they talk all around their agonizing fears of tomorrow. The rebels are a band of teenage boys who are about to graduate from school and face their future: war.

It seems safe to assume that this old-fashioned bildungsroman set in 1918 is also something of a roman a clef. Marai came of age just as World War I was winding down, and he published this novel when he was 30. Each boy fears or hates his father, who is away at the war. Rule-bound, they strike out in thefts. Afraid to die, they cavort in outrageous fantasies, spend stolen money on carnival-type suits that are tailored to not fit them.

Marai paints his characters so convincingly that, scene after scene, the story remains tense with suspense. We turn the pages cautiously, as if opening doors to rooms in which we can hear an argument, because clearly these young men whom we come to know well, these boys who are trying to become men before our eyes, are doomed to disappointment and far worse. We watch their band begin to unravel and finally suffer a dramatic, even melodramatic, collapse.

No one would accuse Marai of subtlety. He is like a composer who brings in the orchestra when he wants to sound elegiac, which is frequently. His writing can be almost as melancholy as the dour expression the middle-aged Marai is wearing in the book jacket’s photograph. The musical metaphor seems apt. Marai has favorite themes: the exile of loneliness within a group, the memory of loss and the fear of impending loss. A theme prominent in one scene will return in muted harmony behind another that dominates a later scene.

But Marai can also be amusing. He has fun, for example, with the provincial views of the townsfolk: “The actor was an object of suspicion in every respect. He used terms like sea, Barcelona, steerage, Berlin, underground train, three hundred francs.... Listening to the actor you could come away with the impression that life consisted of a series of extraordinary events that began tragically but inevitably ended up as comedy.” This view seems like the opposite of Marai’s, in which humor merely enlivens the march of tragedy.

At times there is a Proustian sort of hunger to the story, as in these thoughts by bookish Abel: “Some time, perhaps quite soon, I want to write down all I’ve ever seen or heard, write it down in a great big book, yes, including everything about this town, Tibor, Amade, Etelka, and them all; everything I see and hear right up to the beginning of my book.” Marai’s similar ambition fills these pages with luscious details of street, clothing, food, light, mood.

Until his death, Marai continued to write in a mostly English-speaking country without benefit of translation into English. Szirtes also is an exile who was a child when he fled to Britain in 1956, and his translation of “The Rebels” has a British feel to its slang. The Knopf series reveals a sumptuous oeuvre, and two more of Marai’s works are due to be released soon: “Esther’s Inheritance” and “Portrait of a Marriage,” which was originally three separate novels.

There is now a statue of Sandor Marai in Budapest, but the real monument he built himself, one page at a time.

Michael Sims is the author of “Adam’s Navel” and the forthcoming book, “Apollo’s Fire: A Day on Earth in Nature and Imagination.”