Return of the Con Man

...Esther's crucial encounter with Lajos in her room is a bravura performance of narrative tension...

...Any answers must be gleaned through the unreliable scrim of Esther's telling...

...In the wake of the Soviet takeover, Mârai and his wife settled briefly in Italy and then Switzerland before coming to the United States in 1952...

...With his two children by Vilma in tow, plus a mysterious small entourage, it becomes clear to Esther that she will be hosting one of his finest performances...

...The two exchange pointed yet evasive comments as if they were an old married couple, weary and affectionate of each other's foibles— until Lajos produces a raft of lost love letters he claims he wrote years ago...

...She had expected to marry him, but he abruptly married her younger sister Vilma, then nearly bankrupted the family...

...Because Esther divulges on the first page that Lajos cheats her once more, the energy of Mârai 's novel resides not in what happens next but in how and why: How will Lajos pull offhismost ambitious trick, and why will Esther let him...

...Arriving by cab, Lajos instantly reestablishes his hypnotic power, effortlessly borrowing money for the fare: "The driver needs to buy some oil and I have no change...

...Once again the past, held in abeyance and buried in silence, cannot be denied and returns to change the present...

...One of them, an aggrieved ex-general, eloquently recounts to his former friend a reconstruction of the disastrous events that have brewed inside him for nearly half a century...

...Regardless, the trap has been set, and in the final pages the reader is reluctantly tempted to agree with Esther that "there is a kind of invisible order in life and that what one has begun one has also to end...

...Unfortunately, Esther has not been a mere observer of Lajos' cons, she has been their primary victim...

...After Vilma died, all contact between Esther and Laj os was cut off, and over the next 20 years she secretly longed for her dangerous brother-in-law...

...Yet this book cuts nearly as deep...

...One of Hungary's most highly regarded writers in the 1920s and '30s, he had produced over 40 books—including plays, poetry and novels—by the time he left the country in 1948 at the age of 48...

...Upon receiving a telegram announcing Lajos' imminent appearance that is "news of disaster and delight," Esther braces herself for what she suspects she will not be able to avoid—despite the support of family and friends, and her own awareness of Lajos' charming perfidy...

...Now in their 70s, with World War II starting to rage in the distance, their single meeting is a longawaited summing-up of the entwined ironies of their pasts and their deep losses...

...As she observes with rueful affection, "people don't turn away from Lajos, because his little shows are full of surprises that he himself enjoys but does not prepare, and when the punch line is delivered he loves nothing better than to laugh dreamily and applaud himself...

...The irony is that Mârai did not live to see this theme echoed nor the invisible order of his life revealed...

...Posthumously Mârai became an internationally celebrated author with the rediscovery in the late '90s of his 1944 novelEmbers...

...It was a publishing sensation, drawing comparisons with those twin peaks of Middle European modernist literature, Robert Musil and Joseph Roth...

...forthcoming, "The Moon, Come to Earth: Dispatches from Lisbon" SÂNDOR Marai boasts an odd pedigree in the Authors' Book of Fate...

...Esther's Inheritance, a short novel first published in 1938, might be called Mârai 's trial run for the eventual composition of Embers, widely considered his masterpiece...

...Was her failure to respond to letters he had not known never reached her the perfect excuse for his long absence, or the perfect hook for his latest scheme, or both...

...In the breakthrough Embers (originally titled The Candle Burns Down to Its Stub), two men meet for dinner in the same dining room where they lastsaw each other 40 years ago—to account for a day that began with an aborted hunting accident, destroyed their friendship and a marriage, and altered the course of their lives...

...Though she realizes "the great, decisive moments that broadly govern our lives are far less conscious at the time than they seem later when we are reminiscing and taking stock," she is lost in her own labyrinth...

...Here Esther might be speaking not only of herself but of her creator as well— as if she were the prescient voice of Marai's future...

...Like the old general, Esther, an unmarried woman in her 40 s who tends the almond trees on the remains of her family's once impressive estate, has also endured decades of waiting—in this case for the return of Lajos, the con artist she has loved all her life...

...An antifascist of unbending principles, he refused republication of his work while the USSR occupied his native land...

...He has polished these memories to a luster that gives off its own light in a labyrinth he has little chance of escaping...

...Mârai artfully tempers the credibility of her first person voice with a mixture of conflicting feelings and memories of past events that perhaps she has allowed herself to sculpt too conveniently...

...Ever since, there has been a steady appearance of Mârai 's other works...

...As in one of his novels, the past refused to remain in the past, and Mârai became the recipient of the kind of fate nearly all writers long for—the triumphant discovery of one's genius...

...Alone and largely forgotten, he committed suicide in 1989, mere months prior to Communism's collapse...