The translations of Márai?s novels ?The Genuine Article? and ?Judit?and the Epilogue? by György Kassai and Zéno Bianu were recently published in a single volume under the title ?Métamorphoses d?un marriage? (Metamorphosis of a Marriage) by Albin Michel.
?The Genuine Article? relates a married couple?s ménages ? trois from the point of view of the wife, then the husband. ?Judit?and the Epilogue? tells the story of the transformation of a household servant into a distinguished lady and lover.
In ?The Genuine Article?, Márai builds up suspense as the confessions become intertwined and respond to each other as a chorus, Jacques-Pierre Amette writes in the review of the new translations. The author?s novel wonderfully reflects the last days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the erotic complexity which was dispelled with under Nazism, he writes.
Márai was born in Kassa, in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in 1900. He rose to fame as one of the leading literary novelists in Hungary in the 1930s. Profoundly anti-fascist, he survived the Second World War, but persecution by the Communists drove him away from the country in 1948, first to Italy and then to the United States. Márai committed suicide in San Diego in 1989, never knowing about the fall of the Berlin Wall and the restoration of democracy to Central Europe. He is the author of over twenty books. ?Embers? was the first to be translated into English.
