Portraits of a Marriage -- Sándor Márai

This recent translation of an older Hungarian book is a great example of several styles that are outdated these days. First, there is the multiple POV approach, which was just beginning in the pre-WWII days when this was written. Like my favorite model, Durrell’s The Alexandria Quartet, this book is composed of four short stories, all chronicling the same events but from different points of view and time frames.

The separate story approach has the advantage of reinforcing the truism that 100 people will see the same events in a hundred different ways; and that there are 100 different “truth”s to the one set of events. The memoir genre, which is becoming more and more extensively used, has come under fire recently for “distorting” the “real truth” of events. This separated POV story approach helps to define the memoir as just one of the 100 truths of an event. This clarification isn’t a part of the modern multiple-POV styles. When the POV switches from within a single story, the reader is forced to multi-task and switch POVs, often beyond their ability. There seems to be a fine, gray line of acceptable frequency of switching POVs. Dickens switched at a macro level, maybe every few chapters to a new sub-plot. Alternating chapters is quite common these days, but not commonly done well. I often decide to skip an entire POV, alternate set of chapters, assuming that the author will knit them together in the end.

The other older style of writing was the use of the expository first person narrative. In this case, other characters are never actually incorporated, merely spoken to without response coming back. Each of the first three chapters is a supposed several hour monologue, or more accurately, a dialogue with an imaginary or unhearable friend. This avoids the pesky details like scene setting, entrances and exits, and “he said”-“she said”s. This was an acceptable style prior to stage and screen adaptation became popular around the time of WW-II.

I enjoyed this book, but it’s not for the casual reader. It is a book to be read slowly and one where the entertainment comes from delving deeply into characters.