Burned

[muckefuck]

There I go again, tossing away a week on a subpar novel because I'm too stubborn to pull out even when I know it's not going to get any better. This time the culprit was Márai Sándor and the novel was Embers (a translation of A gyertyák csonkig égnek, which I believe translates literally as "The candles burn to stubs"). The core of it is a climactic confrontation between two former best friends who haven't spoken for 41 years, padded out with an equal amount of background and portentous scene-setting.

But it takes two to have a confrontation and all you have here is one guy banging on endlessly. He already seems to know the answers to all his questions, leaving his nemesis an inert prop. If you brought together every sentence the latter utters, you'd be left with fewer than you'd find from the antagonist in a Socratic dialogue. I really can't remember the last time I wanted to shut up a fictional character this much. In retrospect, the only interesting part was the description of their bachelor days in Vienna.

I only started the novel because I mentioned it to a colleague and he said Márai's Casanova in Bolzano was perhaps the greatest divagation on romantic love he'd ever read. I'd hoped this would be the same for platonic love, but the author seems to have only a few worthwhile insights among all the guff. When will I ever learn that when I read a cover blurb and think, This could either be very good or very bad that "very bad" is the sound way to bet?

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[sandor-baci.livejournal.com]

Try his KILENC KOFFER, "nine suitcases", if you can find it.