Conversations in Bolzano by Sàndor Màrai

Conversations in Bolzano

Hungarian fiction

Original title – Vendégjáték Bolzanóban

Translator – George Szirtes

Source – Personal copy

When I look at the list of books from 1940, I always love to pick a translated book that came out that year. There were a few I had hoped to bring two this week, but this is the oner I will fit in and the other I will be bringing out a review on Monday. This appealed as I had read two other books by the Hungarian writer Sàndor Màrai over the years and have reviewed The Rebels here a few years ago. A writer in his day was considered one of the leading writers in Hungary described by Le Monde as Hungarian Sándor Márai was the insightful chronicler of a collapsing world well this is a book set outside his insightful books into the end of the Austro-Hungarian empire but it follows a man welll Casanova but actually in the book it is often missed it is him using his forename and maybe describing him as more of a myth than a man. Lost Love is in the book love lust friends and also a man that is larger than life.

‘Five,” he grumbled, and bit hard on his lower lip, wagging his head. Screwing up his eyes, he gazed into the fame, then into the deep shadows of the room, then finally into the far distance, into the past, into life itself.

And suddenly he gave a low whistle, as if he had found something he had been looking for. He pronounced the name,

“Francesca.

He thinks back on her when he her mention of the Dukes name.

I was drawn to this a Cassanova is one of those figures in History that is part man, part Myth the real and the false blend. SPO a story following his prison break from Venice and his heading to Bolzano a small village where the Duke had fought a moonlight duel for a woman much younger than both the men and lost the Fair Francesca, barely legal at just 16. They five years earlier when he had fought the duel with the 60-year old duke for this woman’s hand. He has now escaped on the run and has managed to borrow money along the way he turns up dishevelled at the hotel in the town and demands the finest suite in the Hotel. this reminds me of a scene in Withnail and I where Withnail and Cassanova are similar characters. He had scars and had been told if he returned, he be dead so why has he returned what has driven him to come back? What will the Duke do? What will Franseca make of Casanova and his drive to want her as he rhymes lyrically about his feeling for her.

He touched the scars with his fingertips, itemizing and remembering them. There was a line of three scars on his left, all three just above the heart, as if his enemies had unconsciously yet somehow deliberately, instinctively, aimed precisely at his heart. The central scar, the deepest and roughest of them, was the one he owed to His Excellency of Parma and to Francesca. He put his index finger to the now painless wound. The duel had been fought with rapiers. The Duke’s blade had made a treacherous incursion above his heart, so the surgeon had had to spend weeks draining the blood and the suppuration off the deep wound; and there had also been some internal bleeding, as a result of which the victim, after fever fits, bouts of semiconscious delirium, and stretches of screaming and groaning insensibility, finally bade farewell to adventure.

The scars of the first meeting and duel that nearly killed Cassaanova

I love Màrai writing he captures the simmering love of Cassanova so well, and also a love triangle at its most dangerous duel death threats and promise to leave all add to the book. He also shows maybe the true poetic nature of the man that was Cassanova a normal man that had that thing that, as we say made woman weak at the knee a certain air and way with words that drew people in. This is a slower-paced book than I usually like, but it had some great interplay and managed to bring to life a figure I wanted to know more about in Cassanova I suppose looking back at the events now it seems very outdated a 20-year-old woman being argued over by two men both a lot older than her. It is a sign of how times have moved. But also, there is many a Cassannova around still those men that women just can’t help but Love well in Withnail’s case, there is always a sense of the character being larger than life and maybe hiding his own sexual feelings. But there is no doubt about Cassanova feeling for the younger Francesca a muse to this man. Have you read any books by Màrai? He wrote more than 50, but we only seem to have less than ten of his books so far in English.

Winstyons score – +b A yarn may be outdated in its content but still fun.