Portraits Of A Marriage
  • Published: 15 March 2012
  • ISBN: 9781400096671
  • Imprint: Knopf US
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 384
  • RRP: $45.00

Portraits Of A Marriage

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A heartbreaking tale of a man and two women entangled over a lifetime by love, class differences, sacrifice, and self-preservation, from the author of Embers and Esther's Inheritance.

A rediscovered masterwork from famed Hungarian novelist Sándor Márai, Portraits of a Marriage tracks the lifelong entanglement of a man and two women haunted by class differences and misdirected longings.

Peter and Ilonka are a wealthy couple whose outwardly perfect marriage is undone by secrets. The insecure Ilonka believes she can never be elegant and refined enough for her husband, while Peter has long been tormented by his forbidden love for Judit, a peasant and servant in his childhood home. What Judit longs for most, however, is freedom from the constraints of the society that has ensnared all three in a vortex of love and loss. Set against the backdrop of Hungary between the wars, in a world on the verge of dramatic change, this exquisite novel offers further posthumous evidence of Marai’s brilliance.

Translated from the Hungarian by George Szirtes
 
  • Published: 15 March 2012
  • ISBN: 9781400096671
  • Imprint: Knopf US
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 384
  • RRP: $45.00
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About the author

Sandor Marai

Sandor Marai was born in Kassa, in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in 1900. He rose to fame as one of the leading literary novelists in Hungary in the 1930s. Profoundly anti-fascist, he survived the Second World War, but persecution by the Communists drove him away from the country in 1948, first to Italy and then to the United States, Marai committed suicide in San Diego in 1989, never knowing about the fall of the Berlin Wall and the restoration of democracy to Central Europe. He is the author of over twenty books. Conversations in Bolzano is the second to be translated into English.

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Praise for Portraits Of A Marriage

  • FRONT COVER QUOTE: "Brilliant in the acuity of its observations, its unremitting intelligence. . . . Márai gives voice to a vanished world in a chorus that is both eulogy and manifesto." --The New York Times Book Review
  • "A cubist portrait of a harsh love and a dying society, elegantly paced and delightfully contradictory." --Publishers Weekly starred review
  • "With this phenomenal novel, our conviction is confirmed: he ranks as one of the twentieth century's greatest novelists." --Booklist starred review