 
                         20060622.01

               Sandor Marai: Embers (Die Glut)

          The book's title does not reveal much about its
contents. Very different from organic chemistry where the
name of the substance is an acronym descriptive of its
molecular structure.  The novel's protagonist, Henrik, the
General, has been consumed by a passion which has reduced his
life to a smouldering heap of ashes, the embers of which are
the focus of Marai's novel.  The German title, Die Glut,
refers also to embers, but with emphasis on the light and
heat that they exude more so than the ashes that envelop
them.  When I skim the 11 densely printed columns of Volume 8
(of 32) in Grimm's Dictionary, (perhaps equivalent to 20
pages of ordinary print,) devoted to the term Glut, (as
distinct from Aschenglut) I see no references to ashes; I'm
left with the impression that Glut is more significant of
heat, ardor, glowing, fire, whereas Embers is suggestive of
such heat concealed in ashes, possibly on its way out.  But I
may well we wrong. Since the word Glut has a pervasive
domestic usage, .i.e. it is used to describe the combustion
heat in the stove with which people keep warm in the winter,
I assume, inasmuch as all families nourish their own
vernacular, that its definition is more susceptible to family
idiosyncracy than for example the bureaucratic idioms with
which German abounds.  Hence it wouldn't surprise me if usage
varied widely.  I don't think, however it matters.  I don't
think the definition of a title especially in translation, is
ever a key to the meaning of a text.  I remember much ado
about appropriateness of the Shakespearean "Remembrance of
things past" as a translation of Proust's A la recherche du
temps perdu.  The title of a book tells as much or as little
about the book as the caption of a painting does about the
scene depicted.

          As is the case with all good books, Embers is open
to a spectrum of interpretations; and I see no reason to feel
committed to any one of them. My present inclination is to
pursure the hypothesis that the hunt which took place 41
years prior to Konrad's return was in fact for Henrik a mid-
life crisis, a breakdown of his relationships to his wife
Krisztina, to his friend Konrad, and above all to his own
self; and that his accusation of Konrad's murderous intent
was a paranoid psychotic delusion; that Konrad himself could
no longer bear up under the strain of his friend's insanity
and fled, and that Krisztina called Konrad coward for his
failure to confront Henrik's psychosis.  The malady had
pretty much burned itself out after 41 years, else Henrik
would not have replaced the revolver in the drawer, but would
have used it to murder Konrad. That's my tentative
interpretation. Everything I think and do is tentative. As I
read more of the novel I may come up with other ideas.

          The "friendship" between Henrik and Konrad is
suspect because it is so sparsely described. I wonder if the
claim of such extraordinary friendship was not the sign of
great loneliness on the part of Henrik, perhaps even on the
part of the author himself. All novels contain elements of
autobiography.  As I read this novel, all of its characters
strike me as lonely, some of them desperately so: Henrik's
father, lonely in his hunting passion; his mother, exiled from
her home in France, lonely in the frigid isolated Carpathian
castle; Krisztina, lonely abandoned by her husband, Konrad
lonely, if only in the face of his friend's insanity, and Nini,
lonely expelled from her family and redeemed from loneliness
only by her overwhelming love.

                      * * * * *
Copyright 2006, Ernst Jochen Meyer
