Sandor ination of human interaction that is laced with wistful longings for a vanished way of life.These elements coalesce to create a Rashomon tinged portrait that swirls with smoldering emotion and thwarted passion.
Ultimately, their conflicting voices become a harmonious dirge that laments the crumbling of the milieu and the relationships that cocooned them at the start of their life journeys
The novel is a series of linked monologues that are painstakingly self absorbed perspectives of one marriage and the protagonists’ triangular relationship which impacted the union.Ilonka, Peter and Judit each deliver their thoughts to unseen friends and present conflicting versions of their entangled web that is suffused with jealousies, betrayals and class conflicts.
The initial setting is in Hungary between the two World Wars. Each protagonist represents a different strata of Hungarian society. Peter is a wealthy member of the bourgeoisie. Ilonka is cultured but less affluent than Peter.Judit is the impoverished servant.
These unreliable narrators present different versions of the same events colored by each person’s unique reality. Their stories spiral through their refracted lenses to create a vortex of emotion and misunderstanding that changes with each turn of the narrative.
The competing voices form a chorus that alternates between cacophony and harmony. Their familiar world is changing but their traditional social and moral touchstones have not equipped them to cope with their altered circumstances. When we leave them, they are floundering and slightly askew, struggling to understand their new circumstances.
4.5 starsSandor Marai began his literary career as a poet whose artistry is well suited for this novel of a marriage viewed from the three corners of a love triangle. Marai deftly manipulates his reader through the novel’s intense narrative, allowing his three main characters to perform their passionate monologues, each a moving tale as distinct and contrasting as their differing social backgrounds.
The story opens in a bar in post-war Budapest with Ilonka, who comes from a middle class family, holds marriage as sacrosanct, and divorce a sacrilege; recalling her marriage to Peter, an aristocrat, with loneliness and bitter regret. “I understood that my husband whom I had previously believed to be entirely mine – every last inch of him, as they say, right down to the recesses of his soul – was not at all mine but a stranger with secrets.” Her rendition of marital disillusionment, disappointment, and the betrayal that drove them to divorce is touching and sensitive.
Peter’s perspective follows, formed by a highly privileged upbringing, therefore more cerebral than emotional; adding the necessary detail that sheds some light on the relationship that baffled the innocent Ilonka. “A man’s life depends on the state of his soul. Your heart must let me go. I can’t live under conditions of such emotional tension. There are men more feminine than me, for whom it is vital to be loved. There are others who, even at the best of times, can only just about tolerate the feeling of being loved. I am that kind.” Peter later matured in his thinking but remained cynical. He was not my favorite character.
Their divergent backgrounds create differing perceptions that lead to mistrust, fears and betrayals that impact their ability to forge viable relationships
The most striking voice comes from Judit, the second wife, whose dirt-poor rags to riches story gives the reader a clear vision of the change also occurring in Hungary. Her version is the most earthbound and realistic, her own change the most dramatic. “The whole business of the bourgeois and the class war was different from what we proles were told. These people were sure they had a role in the world; I don’t mean just in business, copying those people who had had great power when they themselves had little power. What they believed was that when it came down to it, they were putting the world into some sort of order, that with them in charge, the lords of the world would not be such great lords as they had been and the proles would not remain in abject poverty, as we once were. They thought the whole world would eventually accept their values; that even while one group moved down and another one up, they, the bourgeois, would keep their position – even in a world where everything was being turned upside down.”
