Yapı Kredi Yayınları Martı/Sandor Marai

“... the crowd we encounter everywhere: in a dentist’s waiting room, in the studio apartments of new buildings... All of these are the crowd, even when they are alone. Their souls are the atoms of the collective psyche: this impersonality that multiplies like weeds, spreads, has an ‘opinion’ on every subject yet knows nothing of anything in the true sense, taking flight out of fear, changing colors, aimless and directionless, searching for a route for its mating flight...”

In the early years of World War II, a sinister surprise awaits the undersecretary of a ministry who has drafted a secret document that will alter Hungary’s fate. A young Finnish woman, who fled her country after the Russian bombardment, arrives in search of work. She bears a striking resemblance to the undersecretary’s lover, who took his own life a few years earlier. Who is she really? Is she a spy? Or is the undersecretary’s imagination playing tricks on him? A bond forms between these two people—one exiled within his own mind, the other exiled by the war.

This short novel by Márai, which tells the story of the extraordinary encounter between two kindred spirits swept along toward their fates amid chaos and uncertainty, is undoubtedly the author’s most intense, mysterious, and extraordinary work.

Perhaps, unfortunately, humanity’s fundamental problems remain the same. Márai suffered from the alienation of his time, and perhaps we all harbor a hidden longing for a “Golden Age.” Perhaps, when the world has changed so radically that it has become unrecognizable, we long to catch a whiff of the solid, supposedly consistent days of the past.