Memoir of Hungary by Sando Marai

This past summer in Budapest I came across an English translation of Sandor Marai’s Memoir of Hungary, a book of indelible insight and power. Marai was ideally placed to observe the circumstances of World War II and Soviet takeover of Hungary. More importantly, however, Marai’s erudition and experience as a writer of the middle class experience enabled him to relate the dehumanizing political movements that swept across Hungary in terms that a contemporary reader-one unfamiliar with the history or character of the Hungarian people-can understand. Marai writes with wit and clarity, bringing to life his own attempts to understand communism and its agents, the decay of the middle class in Europe and his own eventual flight from Hungary. This book is a historic work, chronicling the end of one war and the beginning of another. It is a character sketch portraying the good and bad qualities of the Hungarian people, their writers, history and politics and the suffering of average citizens between the two world wars. But Memoir of Hungary is also a deeply personal work which details a thinking man’s alienation in his own country, his anger and sense of betrayal at the failings of middle class virtues and his own struggle to remain silent under the tremendous pressure of bloodthirsty regimes that sought to wring from him an enthusiastic cheer in favor of all he hated.