”Much like a bit of DNA from a frozen mammoth somehow bringing that huge, stomping beast back to life, the novels of the Hungarian Sándor Márai -- many decades old, dealing with long-vanished worlds and only now published here -- have returned from literary extinction with unfaded fierceness and dazzle. (…) Márai, who fled Hungary in 1948 and lived unrecognized in California until his death in 1989, is the Jeremiah among the moral, cultural and political ruins of old Central Europe. And the poet.” ”Márai was the bard of the middle class. The middle classes were as unfashionable and denigrateable in intellectual circles in Thirties Hungary as they are now, but Márai recognised them (and often championed them) as the creators of the “atmosphere” that fostered culture and democracy. This acknowledgement didn’t prevent him from having fun at their expense, or putting the boot in from time to time. (…) Of Márai’s work available in English, Conversations in Bolzano [UK title] is the most cerebral. The Rebels is, I would argue, the best so far, but perhaps too dark for many readers. I suspect Esther’s Inheritance, elegantly rendered by the poet George Szirtes, will rival the commercial success of Embers – I can see the reading groups having a good ding-dong about this one.” ”Esther's Inheritance drips with atmosphere and destiny. Everyone acts just like everyone expects them to act, from Lajos asking for a twenty to give the driver as soon as he arrives ("I have no change") to Esther giving in to Lajos' entreaties, despite the fact that she knows it will destroy everything she has. Esther knows she's doomed, and she plays her part accordingly, unable to fight fate if it means turning away Lajos -- even as she knows he'll abandon her just as quickly as he always has as soon as he gets what he needs. If it weren't such a silly tale it would be tragic (and possibly it's meant to be). (…) But the real reason that it works is because Lajos also has become a semi-tragic figure; he may not deserve sympathy, but events have led to a situation where it's even harder than usual to ignore his pleas (not that anyone was ignoring them before).” ”Márai tends to orchestrate his fiction as if directing a play. As in his best-known novel, Embers, he confines the actions of Esther's Inheritance to a single day, within a lone solitary mansion where memories, and their attendant tragedies, are the only available avenues of escape. J. M. Coetzee summarizes the comradeship of these two novels perfectly in his 2002 essay on Márai, noting that they share 'the same focus on a single character onstage throughout, a similar cryptic psychology issuing in an unexpected act.' But where Embers does not make a subject of its own staginess, in this novel (in fact written chronologically three years earlier than Embers), the machinations of the theater become an occasionally aggressive leitmotif. Of Lajos's dramatic return to the estate after a 20-year absence, Esther observes, 'It was pure theater, every word of it.' (…) In the end, what earns Márai his recent renaissance is not his sentence craft, nor the range of his vision, but his acuity as a diagnostician of the ravages of memory. His novels plumb the destructiveness of our relationship to the past, even as they refuse to leave that past behind.” | 
