Status
Available
Call number
Description
Una tarda, en una elegant pastisseria de Budapest, una dona explica a una altra dona com un dia, havent trobat a la cartera del seu marit una cinta lila, es va adonar que a la vida d’ell hi havia —i potser hi ha encara— una passió secreta i ardent i com, d’ençà d’aleshores, prova debades de reconquerir-lo. Un vespre, en una cafeteria de la mateixa ciutat, l’home que va ser-ne el marit explica a un altre home com va esperar durant una pila d’anys una dona que era la seva raó de viure i com, havent-se divorciat de la primera esposa, s’hi va casar i a continuació la va perdre per sempre. A trenc d’alba, en una pensió de Roma, aquesta darrera dona explica al seu amant com ella, minyona de comarques, va aconseguir casar-se amb un home ric i com a la passió amorosa es pot trobar ràbia, ressentiment i clams de venjança.
Description
Follows the experiences of a passionate triangle of lovers, including wealthy bourgeois couple Peter and Ilonka and their survival-minded servant, Judit.
Genres
Collection
Publication
Edicions 62 (2005), Edition: 008, 416 pages
Physical description
416 p.; 5.31 x 0.83 inches
User reviews
LibraryThing member GCPLreader
I heard such good things about Embers when it was released here a few years back, so when this newly translated work received good reviews this year I decided to give this author a try. Sandor Marai was a prominent Hungarian novelist of the 1930's who came to America to escape the Communist
Portraits of a Marriage is a wonderfully told story of a doomed love triangle. I love the author's style of starting each of its narrative sections with a relaxed friend-to-friend recounting of their lives. Here's a taste from the book's opening:
"Look, see that man? Wait! turn your head away, look at me, keep talking. I wouldn't like it if he glanced this way and spotted me; I don't want him to greet us. Now you can look again...The little squat one there in the fur-collared coat? No, of course not. It's the tall, pale-faced one in the black overcoat talking to that blond stick of a girl behind the counter. He is just having some candied orange peel wrapped. Strange, he never bought me candied orange peel."
The novel focuses on a middle-class bourgeois couple living in pre-WWII Budapest. The wife senses a growing distance with her husband and then discovers his secret love, a poor scullery maid employed in his childhood home. The authors writes endlessly of class differences and the meaning of culture. The final sections deal with the war and the destruction of all that is held dear with the rise of Communism. The novel is exquisitely written and I was completely captivated with its quiet intelligence. recommended
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takeover. Here, he lived in relative obsurity, publishing a few books in his native Hungarian, before finally taking his life in 1989.Portraits of a Marriage is a wonderfully told story of a doomed love triangle. I love the author's style of starting each of its narrative sections with a relaxed friend-to-friend recounting of their lives. Here's a taste from the book's opening:
"Look, see that man? Wait! turn your head away, look at me, keep talking. I wouldn't like it if he glanced this way and spotted me; I don't want him to greet us. Now you can look again...The little squat one there in the fur-collared coat? No, of course not. It's the tall, pale-faced one in the black overcoat talking to that blond stick of a girl behind the counter. He is just having some candied orange peel wrapped. Strange, he never bought me candied orange peel."
The novel focuses on a middle-class bourgeois couple living in pre-WWII Budapest. The wife senses a growing distance with her husband and then discovers his secret love, a poor scullery maid employed in his childhood home. The authors writes endlessly of class differences and the meaning of culture. The final sections deal with the war and the destruction of all that is held dear with the rise of Communism. The novel is exquisitely written and I was completely captivated with its quiet intelligence. recommended
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LibraryThing member thorold
A puzzling book for the reader, because of the way Márai added to it at widely-spaced intervals and at quite different stages in his development as a writer, apparently without changing what he had previously written, but each time shifting the tone and mood considerably and undermining our
The book takes the form of three separate monologues in the voices of Ilonka the First Wife, Peter the Husband, and Judit the Other Woman. These are followed by an Epilogue, also a monologue, in the voice of Ede, the musician who was Judit's lover and the addressee of her monologue.
Ilonka and Peter seem to be a normal, troubled bourgeois couple of the sort that we might well find in a novel by Franz Werfel or Stefan Zweig. They give us their (contrasting, conflicting) views on the story of their failed marriage and the role played by Peter's damaging obsession with his mother's maidservant Judit. There is a lot in both their narratives about the details of their everyday life, but very little reference to other people outside the immediate family — with the notable exception of Peter's friend the writer Lázár, who is obviously a kind of alter ego for the author — and no explicit reference at all to social class or historical events. We don't have any obvious way to tell whether we are meant to be in the 1890s or the 1930s, it just doesn't seem to matter. This is a story about what love means, how it can be resolved with everyday life, and what happens when different people have different expectations about it.
But then Márai hits us with Judit's monologue, addressed to her boyfriend of the moment in a hotel room in Rome sometime in the late 1940s, and obviously written after he went into exile. Judit comes from the rural underclass, her family literally sleeping in a ditch in the winter months, and has pulled herself up by her own efforts, first to become a servant in the apartment of Peter's wealthy middle-class parents, then to turn herself into a lady who could live with Peter on something like equal terms. Her analysis of the way the wealthy live and the irrelevance of Peter and Ilonka and their feelings is just disturbing at first, but we are drawn into her way of seeing things when she shows us (painfully) how the experience of the last days of the war in Budapest changed all the rules. There's obviously a lot here that is taken from the author's direct experience, including Lázár's decision that he can't go on writing under fascism and the destruction of his library in the bombardment.
And then we get the epilogue, written some forty years later, which pulls the rug out from under us again, if not quite as spectacularly as Judit has done.
Quite something, and the English translation by George Szirtes blasts along with real energy.
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confidence in what we have taken from the earlier parts of the book. The book takes the form of three separate monologues in the voices of Ilonka the First Wife, Peter the Husband, and Judit the Other Woman. These are followed by an Epilogue, also a monologue, in the voice of Ede, the musician who was Judit's lover and the addressee of her monologue.
Ilonka and Peter seem to be a normal, troubled bourgeois couple of the sort that we might well find in a novel by Franz Werfel or Stefan Zweig. They give us their (contrasting, conflicting) views on the story of their failed marriage and the role played by Peter's damaging obsession with his mother's maidservant Judit. There is a lot in both their narratives about the details of their everyday life, but very little reference to other people outside the immediate family — with the notable exception of Peter's friend the writer Lázár, who is obviously a kind of alter ego for the author — and no explicit reference at all to social class or historical events. We don't have any obvious way to tell whether we are meant to be in the 1890s or the 1930s, it just doesn't seem to matter. This is a story about what love means, how it can be resolved with everyday life, and what happens when different people have different expectations about it.
But then Márai hits us with Judit's monologue, addressed to her boyfriend of the moment in a hotel room in Rome sometime in the late 1940s, and obviously written after he went into exile. Judit comes from the rural underclass, her family literally sleeping in a ditch in the winter months, and has pulled herself up by her own efforts, first to become a servant in the apartment of Peter's wealthy middle-class parents, then to turn herself into a lady who could live with Peter on something like equal terms. Her analysis of the way the wealthy live and the irrelevance of Peter and Ilonka and their feelings is just disturbing at first, but we are drawn into her way of seeing things when she shows us (painfully) how the experience of the last days of the war in Budapest changed all the rules. There's obviously a lot here that is taken from the author's direct experience, including Lázár's decision that he can't go on writing under fascism and the destruction of his library in the bombardment.
And then we get the epilogue, written some forty years later, which pulls the rug out from under us again, if not quite as spectacularly as Judit has done.
Quite something, and the English translation by George Szirtes blasts along with real energy.
Show Less
LibraryThing member bibliest
Una tarde, en una elegante cafetería de Budapest, una mujer relata a su amiga cómo un día, a raíz de un banal incidente, descubrió que su marido estaba entregado en cuerpo y alma a un amor secreto que lo consumía, y luego su vano intento por reconquistarlo. En la misma ciudad, una noche, el
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hombre que fue su marido confiesa a un amigo cómo dejó a su esposa por la mujer que deseaba desde años atrás, para después de casarse con ella perderla para siempre. Al alba, en una pequeña pensión romana, una mujer cuenta a su amante cómo ella, de origen humilde, se había casado con un hombre rico, pero el matrimonio había sucumbido al resentimiento y la venganza. Marika, Péter y Judit narran su fallida relación con el crudo realismo de quien considera la felicidad un estado elusivo e inalcanzable. Show Less
LibraryThing member MelissaLenhardt
I discovered this through NPR's website. The excerpt they included in their story was very intriguing. I'm placing it here on my to-read list hoping I don't forget about it!
LibraryThing member evatkaplan
bought by mistake. Maria is known as one of Hungarian's best authors.
4 monologues of one marriage in Budapest 1930--1956(in USA), the first wife was Bourgeous but not rich, husband was Bourgeous born and bred and wealthy, 2nd wife was the maid, from very poor Proletariat background who worked her
4 monologues of one marriage in Budapest 1930--1956(in USA), the first wife was Bourgeous but not rich, husband was Bourgeous born and bred and wealthy, 2nd wife was the maid, from very poor Proletariat background who worked her
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way up trying to become Bourgeous, and 4th monologue from 2nd wife's lover after the war. He is a good writer, but very repetitive and long winded. each monologue had the same "voice". about the different classes before the Communist came, what make s one bourgeois or proletariat and are people happier in the USA where they try not to have class differences. and, are there still class differences in the USA--can we ever really change? Show Less
LibraryThing member RickGeissal
I like this author's work very much, initially introduced to him in his brief, great novel Embers. All of his books were written in Hungarian, and only five of them have been translated into English.
Portraits is a story of a marriage told by three protagonists - the wife, the husband, and the
An artifact - Marai was the first person to review Franz Kafka's books.
Portraits is a story of a marriage told by three protagonists - the wife, the husband, and the
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other woman/love of his life. Each tells the story to one other person. The issues are class differences and their effects on the relationship, the making of a marriage, and expectations of a marriage. This novel is another example (after the two of his books I had already read) of the author's remarkable insight into human beings. It is outstanding.An artifact - Marai was the first person to review Franz Kafka's books.
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Call number
083
Original language
Hungarian
Original publication date
1941
1980 (complete)
2011 (English)
1949 (3rd part)
ISBN
842975590X / 9788429755909