Words Without Borders/Reading the World Book Club: The Rebels by Sandor Marai

All this month at Words Without Borders, Mark Sarvas will be leading a book discussion on Sandor Marai’s The Rebels.

The Rebels was a Reading the World 2007 title.

Mark’s introductory post should be up at the WWB Blog soon, but for now, here’s his post about the club, and his introductory paragraph:

The long and interesting literary life of Sándor Márai (or Márai Sándor, as a true Hungarian would call him) suggests that, to paraphrase Fitzgerald, even Hungarians can enjoy second acts. A prolific and respected author of the Hungarian middle class, Márai only became known to American readers when Knopf published Embers in 2001, in a translation from the German – about which more anon – by Carol Brown Janeway. Márai was suddenly enjoying the sort of posthumous success that writers, if they’re honest, hope for, not unlike the attention that’s being given today to Irene Nemirovsky’s lost corpus. Some days it seems a European writer can’t catch a break in America until he’s dead. (In Márai’s case, it’s especially galling as he made San Diego his home in his later years, dying there in 1989.)