Mészáros Tibor (szerk.): Once I lived, I, Sándor Márai. Patterns from a globetrotting Hungarian's life (Budapest, 2004)

Márai's secret

is linked with nostalgia and feeling in Máraí's works. This means that he evokes only the world living in his desires, which perhaps never even existed in the way he describes it. The "time of the fathers" creates a full impression with all its failings and weaknesses.

Style. Because of the foregoing, there is a kind of nostalgia present within the writer, in the person of today towards the past. A feeling of life, ideals, relationships - the writer's world is built on these, which are affected by a romantic style. It is no coincidence that it is precisely those of Márai’s novels that are being translated throughout Europe which discuss human relationships and which are set in intimate, closed spaces.

These works are characterized by nostalgia. The characters live in the past and can only understand the present from there, even if a few decades have passed and they should have learned from events of recent times. Remembrance is linked with nostalgia and deep feeling. Aristocracy, irony and skepticism can all be found ín Máraí's writing, and it is this that makes the writer and his works attractive for many.

And then there is his extraordinary expressive power, his skill with language. Some of his works are almost untranslatable (like Sinbad Returns Home or the Funeral Oration). The other fact is a miracle, one that we saw here in England. Whilst it was wrong to translate the work via the German, the novel still had enormous power, despite being retranslated, to the extent that it received only positive notices.

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