Embers – as i read it

I know nothing about the author Sandor Marai -- this book is translated from german version which was translated from hungarian ....just a random pick which i keep doing . its actually a kind of monologue which occasionally is too much too long though it has other characters around they talk rarely and that too in oneliners.

Its a philosophical book in a way that the main speaker Henrik makes his final observations on life ,friendship and all the passions that govern it.The setting is the pre-world war era and the characters are 75 yr old and the last time they met was 41 yrs ago in presence of a woman who has since died. There is an air of emotional suspense running in the book but the end is may be abrupt...at the end may be you feel cheated if you like open and close stories.

But its the observations the book makes that make one feel being sympathized or understood. Some which all who observe and think of life at some point note and some which we never experience but wonder.
Some extracts which i found such, some echoing my thoughts and some making me ponder..............

" For this they had no need of a pact...the sort of portentous intensity invoke by people when for the first time they experience an unconscious need to remove another human being from the world body and soul and make him uniquely theirs. For that is the hidden force within both friendship and love .Their friendship was deep and wordless , as are all emotions that will last a lifetime and like all great emotions this one contained within itself ...a sense of guilt ,for no one may isolate one of his fellows from the rest of humanity with impunity"

"Nothing is so rare in the young as a disinterested bond that demands neither aid nor sacrifice................Everything life has to offer later, sentimental yearnings or raw desire, intense feelings and eventually the bonds of passion, will all be coarser, more barbaric."

"Memory has a wonderful way of separating the wheat from the chaff. There can be some great event and ten twenty years laters one realizes it had no affect whatsoever. And then one day ,one remembers a hunt or a passage in book" "Sometimes it seems to me that words that we utter, or stifle, or write that are the issue, if not the only issue."

"One rarely knows when an act or a word will trigger some final irreversible alteration in any relationship" "I am thinking that people find truth and collect experiences in vain, for they cannot change their fundamental nature.........the only thing...one can do is to take the given's of one's fundamental nature and tailor them to reality as cleverly and carefully as one can."

"The greatest secret and the greatest gift any of us can be offered is the chance for two similar people to meet. It happens so rarely--it must be because nature use all its force and cunning to prevent such harmony ,perhaps.....the renewal of life need the tension between two people of opposite temperaments who seek each other out...like an alternating current....between positive and negative poles, think of all the despair and the blind hope that lie behind this duality."

"One can achieve everything in life, wrestle .....seize all for oneself, but one cannot change another’s tastes or inclinations...that essential otherness no matter how close or important the bond"

The greatest disappointment in the book was it has only one persons view-- The woman’s view of course is not even expected to be presented from the beginning but you expect the answers or the view of the man being questioned but it is here you are disheartened.Despite its long lines which sometimes get frustrating the observations are pretty haunting with respect to the situation. But then books and stories and words , they keep safe my heart and soul from this world. Just googled it up seems they are makin a movie on it with Wionna Ryder.hmmm

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
P.S: had published this earlier on Fragrantechoes my other blog but preferred it here
so moved it.