As a westerner, it’s hard not to feel cheated sometimes when a book goes Eastern European, as does Sandor Marai’s A gyerty�k csonkig �gnek (Embers). The deep, abstruse contemplation on the Nature of Things is in full swing. You are following. It’s difficult but somehow, with the help of your abundantly stocked classics library, you stay the rigorous intellectual course. With frequent pauses to ponder the metaphysics of it all, you feel you are on top of the material. And then — the writer betrays his lack of faith in the possibility of communication. In Marai’s case it goes like this: “Hunting — real hunting — was something else. You will not understand because you were never a hunter.” All the general’s talk is to no avail as he apparently believes that understanding can only come from first hand experience. That doesn’t stop him talking though. Here he is a couple of pages later, describing an incident that took place years earlier, in the East (Baghdad, to be precise). His host has just brought in a lamb: “… our host took out a knife and with an unforgettable gesture, slaughtered it. That gesture can never be learned. It is an eastern gesture, from times when killing still had a religious, symbolical sense, when it was identified with something essential, a sacrifice.”

You cannot understand hunting unless you hunt. You cannot copy a simple gesture unless you were born into the particular culture… The trouble with Eastern European literature is not that it is over-intellectual. It is that it is too mystic for westerners. It’s the west’s loss: Embers is a great book. The tension, the atmosphere, the careful unfolding of the story, the exquisitely timed release of information — all make for a novel of suspense many’s a more brutish western wordsmith would be envious of.