 
                         20060612.00

     The more I think about this book, the larger it looms in
my pantheon of "great books."

     The "Embers" plot is written in the form of a mystery
story.  One is introduced to events as if one were a
stranger, - which indeed one is, to the stories characters.
Their histories are revealed bit, by bit, piece by piece as
if one were completing a jig-saw puzzle; at the conclusion of
which there still remain two explicit uncertainties.  Did
Krisztina plot with Konrad that he should murder the General.
If so why? Was it for the inheritance, was it that the
General's death would have made them wealthy? Did Konrad in
fact plan to murder the General and fail at the last moment
to carry out his plan? Or was the idea of the planned murder,
and indeed Krisztina's infidelity nothing more than the
figment of the General's paranoid imagination?  Was the
general in fact like Leontes in the Winter's Tale? And once
the analogy has been broached, doesn't Krisztina come more
and more to resemble Hermione. Like the General and Konrad,
Leontes and Polixenes were childhood friends, inseparable,
one from the other. As in the Winter's Tale there is a
cultural difference between Sicilia and Bohemia, so there is
a cultural difference between the General and Konrad, to
forms the background of the tragedy. For that matter, the
distance from Bohemia to Hungary is not that great.

     The psychoanalyst would say that the attraction between
the General and Konrad was homosexual, and that Konrad,
because he couldn't "have" the General, made do with the
General's wife.  I am familiar with this sort of
rationalization, because I have been the object of it; fodder
for a fourth party's psychiatrists rationalization, to wit:

     But life is not a mystery.  The only thing that makes
life a mystery is amnesia.  But in Embers, mystery is created
by the author.  Might it have been that the General himself
was unsure of his thoughts, of his suspicions and wanted a
corroboration which he in the end was unable to elicit from
his guest?  He could not know what happened, He only
suspected it.  Krisztinas diary which disappeared at the
crucial moment is also evidence that the General and
Krisztina could not speak to one another, a situation in
which paranoid fantasies flourish.

     The General's self-imposed isolation from Krisztina
speaks volumes about his relationship to her, and suggerts
that he was subconsciously seeking a pretext to be free of,
to be rid of her.

     "Embers" as a pathologic reckoning, accounting of ones
existence.  as deeply flawed Lebenskunst.

     The Generals paranoia is so convincing that the casual
reader is persuaded of its truth; alternatively, that truth
is so demoralizing that one protects oneself by declaring it
paranoid.  Thus the book calls into question not only the
General's sanity but also the reader's.

                      * * * * *
Copyright 2006, Ernst Jochen Meyer
