Fiction: Venice, 1756, and the hour is midnight on Hallowe'en. After 16 months in jail ("four hundred and eighty-eight days and nights on a bed of straw with the stink of human misery in my nostrils") the maverick sexual adventurer, Giacomo Casanova, has had enough.
With the apt assistance of a disgraced monk, the man whose very name describes a particularly ruthless style of preying on females makes a bid for freedom. Society holds its collective breath, and then sighs - the men with resentment, the women with longing.
Casanova and Balbi, the monk, his grumpy servant of sorts, bicker and snipe. Having devised a plan, the runaway prisoner dismisses "his disgusting companion" and each makes his own way to the village of Bolzano. True to his lifelong habit of looking after himself by making use of others, Casanova quickly locates a woman who will feed him and tend his wounds. She is the wife of the captain of the local militia. Fortunately, her husband is not at home. He is out searching for an escaped prisoner. Such is the luck of Casanova.
Conversations in Bolzano, an atmospheric tale of a serial love artist skilled in seduction if indifferent to real passion, opens with a comic flourish bordering on farce. It takes Casanova three days to reach Bolzano, where he has arranged to team up with Balbi again. Comfort, as ever, is uppermost in the cad's thoughts, and he proceeds to issue orders to the innkeeper who "nervously examined his tattered guests" on being asked for his finest rooms. The resourceful Casanova explains his shabby appearance by claiming to be a Venetian nobleman who has been robbed on the frontier, the thieves having left only his Venetian dagger.
Márai quickly establishes the mounting chaos introduced to the inn by the new arrival and his sniggering companion. He ensures little sympathy is won by the soon-to-be-duped innkeeper, who is described as "red with excitement: he wiped his temples with a fat finger and couldn't make up his mind whether to run to the police station or to go down on his knees and kiss the man's hand. Being undecided he simply stood there in silence". The tone is comic and Márai sustains this lightness of touch. At first, the elegantly sharp narrative appears set to spin on the character of the opportunistic Casanova, "that name so notorious and irresistible, so dangerous and fascinating, a name so redolent of adventures and flight, a name that attracted the secret service in whatever town it appeared".
English-language readers who discovered Sandor Márai through the publication of Embers in translation in New York in 2001, and in London the following year, hailed the emergence of a lost literary master of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Originally published in Budapest in 1942, Embers is a work from his middle period, as is Conversations in Bolzano. By the 1930s, Márai, who had been born in 1900 in Kassa in the twilight period of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, was a major Hungarian novelist. During his career, he published more than 20 books.
His own story is as tragic as any he wrote. An anti-fascist who endured the second World War at home in Hungary, he was then driven out of his country in 1948 by the Communists. Eventually, having spent some time in Italy, he settled in the US. But Márai never found peace, and committed suicide in 1989, oblivious to the fall of the Berlin Wall. Much is made of his strongly moral view of life and society and this sense of honour underpins Embers, a masterful elegy of betrayal and evasion. It is a novel that approaches the eerie perfection of The Great Gatsby.
Love is its central theme. Márai had a romantic's vision; emotional pain is his thesis. Two former friends, once intimate but long separated by an act of deception, meet again after 41 years, during which the old hurts have continued to fester. Their dignified, if somewhat heavily choreographed, confrontation takes place over the course of one long night in the home of the General, who has spent reclusive years in his Carpathian mountain castle brooding over the past.
Presiding over the meeting is the ghost of the woman they both loved. The conversation quickly develops into a monologue. Embers is remarkable, formal and evocative of another time, another set of social morals; it is enhanced by its austere if bitter grace.
Conversations in Bolzano also uses the monologue device, but only after what appears to be a comedy featuring a rogue has begun to take on a darker hue. The novels, divided by only two years, are very different despite their shared use of long monologues. Some of this may be due to the translators: Carol Brown Janeway certainly catches the formal detachment and eloquent anguish of Embers, yet poet George Szirtes, a Hungarian long settled in England, brings a maverick humour both to the characterisation and utterances of Casanova, who never convinces as a seducer.
Neither handsome nor likeable, Márai's Casanova is approaching 40 and aware of ageing. He decides he is really a writer, although he has yet to write anything, and, as Balbi asks him: "But when will you have time to write, Giacomo? If you spend it all seeing, hearing, and getting to smell everything you've talked about you will never find enough time for writing."
Casanova has a ready answer. "I shall write when I have done as much living as I consider necessary."
The days at the inn become caught up in Casanova's determination to acquire a new wardrobe. Suddenly, the narrative begins to shift. The Duke of Parma, the man who had earlier defeated Casanova's bid to seduce Francesca, the young girl that the old Duke had already selected as his wife, arrives at the inn. This is the man who had seriously wounded his much younger rival and promised Casanova that, should he ever return, he would kill him. The meeting is prefaced by the description of the old duke battling the stairs and his age, on his way to Casanova's room.
Once there, a serious offer, not a death threat, is outlined to Casanova. The duke's speech becomes a long monologue, very formal, barbed and reminiscent of the General's heavily detailed speeches in Embers. Through this long sequence, Márai offers the most in-depth analysis not only of Casanova's personality but of his plight, as a man doomed never to find satisfaction in love. It does falter; at times the Duke does express the fear that underlines losing a loved one to a rival; elsewhere, his speeches are overblown and repetitive. Equally, when Francesca, the young wife, arrives to experience the planned night of love which her husband believes will free her of her desire for Casanova and so secure the Duke her company in his final moments, the narrative becomes overly rhetorical.
Conversations in Bolzano could as easily be titled "monologues". Yet Márai, an unusual and daring writer of ideas, has written an extraordinary study of the perverse, artificial, cowardly and often self-deceiving nature of love. No, this novel does not approach the grandeur of Embers, yet in its very ambivalence lies an unsettling and candid view of one man's self-created hell.
Conversations in Bolzano by Sandor Márai, translated by George Szirtes, Viking, 294pp. £14.99
