Portraits of a Marriage

Sandor Marai

Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, Mar 6, 2012 - Fiction - 384 pages

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
 

Contents

• Section 1: 3
• Section 2: 5
• Section 3: 11
• Section 4: 30
• Section 5: 46
• Section 6: 67
• Section 7: 107
• Section 8: 120
• Section 9: 135
• Section 10: 168
• Section 11: 197
• Section 12: 204
• Section 13: 213
• Section 14: 224
• Section 15: 247
• Section 16: 266
• Section 17: 289
• Section 18: 294
• Section 19: 296
• Section 20: 331
• Section 21: 333

About the author

Sándor Márai was born in Kassa, in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in 1900, and died in San Diego, California, in 1989. He rose to fame as one of the leading literary novelists in Hungary in the 1930s. Profoundly antifascist, he survived the war, but persecution by the Communists drove him from the country in 1948, first to Italy, then to the United States. He is the author of the internationally best-selling Embers, Casanova in Bolzano, Esther’s Inheritance, The Rebels, and Portraits of a Marriage.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Portraits of a Marriage; Vintage International
• Author: Sandor Marai
• Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2012
• ISBN: 1400096677, 9781400096671
• Length: 384 pages
• Subjects: Fiction / Historical / General; Fiction / Literary; Fiction / Romance / Historical / General