'Esther's Inheritance,' by Sándor Márai

A Novel

Sándor Márai

Translated from the

Hungarian by George Szirtes

Alfred A. Knopf: 148 pp., $24

Much like a bit of DNA from a frozen mammoth somehow bringing that huge, stomping beast back to life, the novels of the Hungarian Sándor Márai -- many decades old, dealing with long-vanished worlds and only now published here -- have returned from literary extinction with unfaded fierceness and dazzle.

"Embers," the first to appear, in 2001, is a night-long verbal duel between two dying aristocratic rivals on the eve of World War II. The cuckolded husband employs a bitterly searching monologue; his cuckolder, a fulminating silence. Márai made the quarrel over ancient passions a tensely spacious surrogate for the breaking of nations that was about to shatter Europe for a second time in 20 years.

"Casanova in Bolzano" (2004) starts as a mannered, achingly funny farce. It ends with a three-way climactic exchange between the famous libertine, a powerful prince and the woman they both claim. Their arguments become a brilliantly searching examination of freedom and obligation, of seduction's art and society's governance, with the woman herself providing an unexpected conclusion. A third, "The Rebels" (2007), has a band of youths playing dangerous war games.

The novels endow distant times and places with an immediate freshness and power. They are not just elegant museums, though; they are the warring conquests and pillager fortunes that go to establish museums. Márai employs his extraordinary monologues and dialogues as cannons; and the outcomes, like history's, offer both sharp reversal and drifting ambiguity.

"Esther's Inheritance," the latest to be published in English, is smaller in reach than the others, and seemingly less dramatic. Its power builds, though, culminating as they do in climactic dialogues and a reversal that turns it on its head. On our head too, even though what Márai reveals he has hidden in plain sight.

Esther, an aging spinster, tells the story, which begins when she was living with Nunu, her cousin and companion, in a provincial town. Their large house and garden were all that remained of her father's wealth. The rest of it had been borrowed, swindled or simply filched by Lajos, an irresistible charmer who had moved in decades before, married Esther's sister Vilma and departed after Vilma died.