Portraits of a Marriage

Starred review from November 15, 2010
This autopsy of a failed marriage shows a virtuosic control of character and tone meaningfully set against the ossification of the fin de siècle Austro-Hungarian empire. It starts with Ilonka, whose middle-class husband, Peter, is in love with his mother-in-law's maid, Judit. Ilonka's bitter tale of a fight to win her husband back, only to be outdone by the other woman, gives way to the same story told by Peter, itself followed by Judit's take. What emerges is a cubist portrait of a harsh love and a dying society, elegantly paced and delightfully contradictory. Ilonka, Peter, and Judit each possess strong philosophies on life and love, and Márai successfully probes the blind spots and conflicting assumptions in their varied points of view. With each new voice, each very much its own thanks to Szirtes's faultless new translation, Márai (1900–1989) builds suspense and reveals new layers and twists to this tale. Suffused with nostalgia and regret, the book evokes and examines both the nature of longing and the decline of a great empire.

Starred review from January 1, 2011
Three interior monologues stand as a triptych in the latest novel to be translated into English by a Hungarian writer who flourished in the 1930s. With this phenomenal novel, our conviction, based on the Mrai novels already translated, including Embers (2001) and The Rebels (2007), is confirmed: he ranks as one of the twentieth centurys greatest novelists. The books title is apt; the three sections focus on the conditions of one particular marriage: that between a Budapest industrial magnate and his beautiful wife in the deceptively peaceful years between the world wars, when the world had not been boarded over yet; for a moment everythingEurope, life itselfwas bathed in intense light. In seeking definitions of love, and in excercising his obviously abiding interest in the theme of loneliness in marriage, the author, in a glorious demonstration of psychological acuity, offers his powerful findings from three perspectives: from the husband and from the wife, naturally, but also from the servant girl in the mans parents household who becomes his second wife. The idea that marriage partners keep information about themselves from each other is the outwardly simple, even ordinary, premise upon which the narrative rests; it is the authors brilliant dissection of that situation that makes this novel so exceptional. The ultimate factor in deciding if the novel works is whether the three segments mesh well enough to give the reader a smoothly integrated whole picture, and Portraits of a Marriage is the last word on the effectiveness of the triple-voice technique.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)