One of literature’s most seductive questions was asked by the Hungarian novelist Sandor Marai in “Embers,” his exquisite novel of friendship and betrayal, published in Budapest in 1942, but not translated into English until 2001, 12 years after his death. “Do you want it to be the way it used to be?” a woman asks a man. “Yes,” he responds.“Exactly the same. The way it was last time.” This exchange occurs not between lovers but between a 91-year-old servant and the 75-year-old general she nursed as a baby, in whose household she has remained. The general wants her to set up the dining room just as it looked at his life’s most critical juncture, 41 years earlier, when the closest, most sacred friendship of his youth came to an end.
