Carl Gustav Jung suggested that we are collectively capable of intuiting forthcoming social catastrophes, not in any mumbo-jumbo sense, but as an understanding, too complex to be made conscious, of the almost infinite strands gathered by the Fates to spin together our reality. This is the feeling that pervades The Rebels: of something tightening, twisted and strong, about to rope us all in. Márai’s ability is to convince the reader that this feeling is not proof of a writer’s facile hindsight but of his characters’ unmediated perception of the future — the ability to recognise, like animals, the approaching storm.
Sándor Márai belongs to that tragic breed of writers whose readership is posthumous. Born in 1900 in what was still the Austro-Hungarian empire, he was recognised as an important literary figure during the second world war but, unable to bear the communist regime that followed, he went into exile and was quickly forgotten. Unknown and unread, he died in 1989, in San Diego, California. Shortly afterwards, the translation of his novel Embers brought him international fame as one of the most subtle, intelligent, original explorers of what Henry James once called the ‘social psychology’ of the individual, the knowledge that our collective lives are made up of mandarins and button-pressers, and that we play both roles relentlessly and unwittingly. Readers of The Rebels will see why.
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