The Sunday Salon: Hot dreams with Brutus

Last time (oops, it was a while ago) I’ve mentioned the novel Castorp by Pawel Huelle.

I’ve finished it, of course, and I liked it. Somehow I had to remember myself constantly, it’s not a Mann’s novel, the atmosphere was so familiar.

The story is quite simple, Hans Castorp (the protagonist of the Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann) spends two years in Danzig (Gdansk, now in Poland), he studies civil engineering at the university, this is the first time, he is alone and far from his family. He is a bourgeois, he is very sophisticated. In every aspects. So it’s not accidental, what happened with him on the magic mountain. (In Mann’s book.)

He is too sophisticated and it’s a bit funny when his German mentality meats with some Central-European grotesque situations. His conclusion: there is no system in the world.

The book of this weekend is a novel by Sandor Marai. [Something has happened in Rome]. It’s about the hours after the assassination of Julius Caesar.

Maybe interesting, that the historical novels of Marai (who spends ca. 50 years in exile after ww2) were published here, in Hungary just some years ago.

During the reading (the book is from a library) a can see notes on the pages, and I’m a bit sad about it. Not because of the notes, but it’s contents. The reader before me has interpreted the story that way, every motive has a connection to Marai’s live.

For me it isn’t important. For me is more important that the structure of this story is not a real novel it’s more like a screenplay. For me is more important, that every character has an opinion about Caesar, but these are quite different.

Well, and why this strange title of my post? Because yesterday, maybe it was the influence of this book’s theme, but I had a quite hot dream a with Brutus (Tobias Menzies, from the HBO series Rome), I don’t know why especially with him.

Caesar was much more sexier.

Review: Sindbad Comes Home

During reading this novel by Sandor Marai, I was thinking about how typical for Hungarian stories this eternal nostalgia. Just thinking about my posts, how many time was the main theme of a story the past, the bittersweet reminiscence of the good old days.

The Sindbad Comes Home isn’t an exception, it’s an other nostalgic novel again.

The protagonist of this book is Sindbad, the seaman, an old writer. He has to get 60 pengos (the old currency in Hngary) to by a new clothes for his daughter, and we can follow his way all day long.Long time ago there was everything different, more aristocratic, more elegant, the old writers knew how to live, how to eat(!), how to spend the whole day. This is the meaning of every sentence in this book, there was something long time ago, which is no more, the world has change a lot. But Sindbad is an old-fashioned man.

On the other hand, money just runs trough his fingers, even the 60 pengos what he gets from his editor for he’s written in a restaurant he’ll spend for useless things. Even the moral of this story is he knows many-many thing, but most of them are useless in this new world.

Although this story is told on a bittersweet-melancholic voice, I think, at the end, there is nothing sweet anymore in this voice. Just the bitterness.