Sandor Marai

Here in Barcelona there has been held an exhibition about the Hungarian writer Sandor Marai. He is one of the most prominent figures of the 20th C. Central European literature.

Marai said:

"Writers and artists have two homelands: the place when they were born linked with them through language and blood, and Paris"

In this exhibition, there was a picture of the writer with Thomas Mann.

This is a New York Times review of one of Sandor Marai books

Poet, journalist, dramatist, translator, novelist and essayist, Marai worked in just about every literary form, but for Hungarians it’s probably the diaries that excite the greatest admiration; written in a bare prose, they offer a merciless examination of himself and his era. He loved his native language, and stuck with it in exile (he could easily have switched to German) although he was well aware this decision ensured indigence and obscurity. His relations with his fellow Hungarians, however, were not very smooth. Insanely principled, he found himself isolated even within émigré circles.

Shortly before he committed suicide in San Diego in 1989, Marai oversaw the publication of “The Garrens’ Work: A Novel in Two Volumes.” This was what he judged his magnum opus, the story of the Garren family from his hometown, Kassa (now Kosice, in Slovakia).