The critic Jean Soublin, writing in Thursday's issue of French daily Le Monde, called Márai one of the most important authors of the 20th century. The first half of The Blood of San Gennaro describes with "fraternal irony" the people of San Gennaro, Italy, where Márai lived for three years after fleeing communist Hungary, and their symbiotic relationship with the beautiful surrounding landscape. In the second half of the book, Márai describes his life as a young emigrant in California. Surrounded by a paradise that few could achieve, he still doubts whether he made the right decision in "one of the book's most beautiful parts", Soublin said.
Márai was born in Kassa in 1900, when the city was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. 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.
Source: Hungarian News Agency (MTI) / Penguin Books
