Mészáros Tibor (szerk.): Once I lived, I, Sándor Márai. Patterns from a globetrotting Hungarian's life (Budapest, 2004)
Márai's secret
Márai's secret (Magyar Magic) Success All success is suspicious. How shall 1 respond to the postman's praise? The brave man, the best husband, father, employee and compatriot. But 1 don't need the prompt understanding of the best husband and compatriot. 1 need the fistfight that 1 am pursuing with the resisting initiate: the reader who is worth as much as 1. It is impossible to conquer the world, only to gain victory. The conqueror who gathers the world into his lap always sacrifices himself. He who persuades, forces someone or something to his knees, a person or some kind of idiocy. This other success in life, the success which can only ever be personal: to persuade minds one by one. This is the best we can hope to achieve. The above short text is from one of Sándor Máraí's aphoristic works, Sky and Earth. Today, when we know of the writer's worldwide success, even the writer himself would be astonished by how widely known and read his works are. He wouid not understand why his works have become so well known from Japan to Italy, from Croatia to England. What is this Márai's secret? The success story began in 1998, when the Milan publisher Adelphi released Embers under the title Le brad. The first impression was in April, and by December readers were buying the tenth impression. (By October 2002 the work was in its 29th impression in Italy. In two years 220,000 copies of the novel were sold). The Italian writer and publisher Roberto Calasso is considered to have triggered the success. After the French edition went unnoticed, he said that "Márai's prose bears comparison with the classics of world literature, with the works of Thomas Mann and Franz Kafka." Most Italian critics praised the work's particular aristocratic mood. Pietro Citati, for example, considers the works greatest moment to be the disjointed pictures from the yellow pages of the diary or the kiss of the old nurse. They compare Marai to Robert Musil or Joseph Roth. A critic at the Corriere della Sera, Antonio D'Orrico, almost shouted about the work in his article. "Oh! What a film Luchino Visconti could have made of this book!" The critic from Diario focuses on secrecy. "Space and time in this novel are tightly intertwined: the castle walls keep the secret at least as well as the soul of the bearer." In the Milan Panorama we can read, "The odor of the institute, the mould in the castle, the scent of the beds or of tobacco, or of water - with the help of all these precise details Marai reanimates for us the world of yesterday, leaving the action in the background." (One year later at the Turin book fair, another Máraí novel, Eszter's legacy, won a very respectable fourth prize and Márai's works began to be translated into many languages: Dutch, Finnish, Catalan, Greek, Polish, Japanese...) 52
