More Márai

After rounding up one more bag of book-loot yesterday (two worthwhile sales in two days!), I headed back to my lair to finish The Rebels. Things didn't, as I'd hoped, take any sort of sincerely sinister turn. Rather, what seemed initially to bear the beautiful-yet-horrific possibilities of a Young Törless turned out in the end to have settled for a somewhat vaguely-explained, not-truly-scandalous-or-memorable climax. As I noted in my brief Goodreads and LibraryThing reviews, Márai just didn't take things far enough or do them clearly enough. Not an unpleasant read, though; just an indication that the author could have been much bolder.

I'm not sure whether George Steiner has said anything about Márai (cursory investigations aren't turning anything up), but it would be interesting to hear his thoughts on the man and/or his work. I'm nearing the end of Steiner's Language and Silence, and although I can only take so much of literary criticism (an attitudinal stance I feel Steiner himself might oddly enough share or have shared at some point), his sometimes-curmudgeonly analysis of pretty much anything never fails to be engaging.

A Hungarian Turn

After my adventures in Beckett, I've moved on to Sándor Márai's The Rebels, which I grabbed at a library sale a few years back. As happens with a lot of such purchases, at best, I'll skim the back or inside cover, but don't pay all that much attention to it, lest any surprises be ruined by a publisher's teaser and/or summary. And so, I'm not sure whether or not having dutifully imbibed the rundown before cracking this thing open would have made any difference to my expectations-- but after tooling through the first chapter with a three-star (out of five) rating in my mind, I was pleasantly intrigued to find in chapter two that this little story has moved in an unexpected, and possibly disconcerting, direction. Unfortunately, the page-turning marathon of the night before left me too tired to keep going last night, so I'll have to put my curiosity on hold for another few hours.

Is it wrong to keep my fingers crossed for sinister developments? I don't really think they'll ensue from this group of pretty average, restless boys-- but Márai's creepy-crawly signature, featured here on a statue dedicated to him in Košice, gives me the (unfounded) hope that such things will unfold: