Embers Sándor Márai Translated by Carol Brown Janeway Vintage 213 pp. ISBN: 0-375-70742-5 Available from Powell's Books.

The story opens as one of two main characters, Henrik, an aging general, receives word that his long-estranged friend Konrad will be visiting -- a man he has not seen in 41 years. The meeting is a monumental one -- we sense that immediately -- but it is only over the course of more than 200 pages of beautifully written narrative that we gradually, gracefully come to understand the relationship between the two men and what came between them.

There's very little current action in the book. The main story is told through memories, from the standpoint of a reticent man who has spent a lifetime denying and repressing pain, yet the visit from his childhood friend unleashes a near-tidal wave of feeling in the general. The book's main tension comes from the conflict between his constrained, orderly life in the rural castle where he was born, and the tragedy that destroyed his marriage and closest friendship. Recalling a half-century-old conversation with his nurse, the general observes that "Decades pass, one walks through a darkened room in which someone has died, and suddenly one recalls long forgotten words and the roar of the sea. It's as if those few words had captured the whole meaning of life, but afterwards one always talks of something else."

This is a deeply foreign book, rooted in a culture of duty and hierarchy that no longer exists anywhere, and has certainly never been a feature of American life. The general, told early that he was destined for a life as a soldier, never fully understands Konrad, born to middle-class parents, quietly rebellious, artistic and poor. The difference between the two was never starker than in how they listened to music, as described in this lovely passage. "(Henrik) came from the world where soft music lilted through dining rooms and ballrooms and salons, but not the way his friend liked it. It was played to make life sweeter and more festive, to make women's eyes flash and men's vanity throw sparks...Konrad's music, on the other hand, didn't offer forgetfulness; it aroused people to feelings of passion and guilt, and demanded that people be truer to themselves in heart and mind. Such music is upsetting, the son of the Officer of the Guards thought to himself, and began rebelliously to whistle a waltz."

Konrad appears roughly halfway through the book, and the two old friends settle into a wary conversation about the central event that drove them apart. Forty-one years earlier, on a hunting expedition at the general's castle, the general and Konrad are tracking a deer when the general suddenly senses betrayal -- that his friend is aiming not at the deer, but at him. "You took aim for half a minute, and I knew that down to the second, without a watch. I knew that you were not a fine shot and that all I had to do was move my head a fraction of an inch and the bullet would whistle past my ear and maybe hit the deer...But I also knew I couldn't move because my fate was no longer mine to control: some moment had come, something was going to happen of its own volition." The moment passes, no shot is fired, but irreparable damage has been done. When Konrad leaves the castle, the general follows him to his rented home, a place where he has never been invited. Konrad has clearly fled, and as the general discovers this, his wife arrives at the house. Konrad, we later learn, abandons his army commission and travels to the tropics, where he spends the rest of his adult life. The wife, who has been having an affair with Konrad, never speaks to her husband again during the remaining 11 years of her life.

Ruptured abruptly, the men's friendship ends, yet it remains one of the defining stories of the general's life, and in this narrative, he seeks to understand and reconcile it before he dies. The thing that makes the book so beautiful is not just the writing, which is excellent, or the vivid description of life in the Hapsburg Empire, but the idea that through introspection, memory and conversation, life's most senseless events can be made sense of. It's a mannered book, where people with every right to hate each other dine formally together and shake hands before parting, and yet there's an undercurrent of deep feeling that's absent from our let-it-all-hang-out culture. This is a foreign world, with rules and expectations that 21st century Americans can't fully comprehend, yet Embers is so deeply human and evocative, that we see this world clearly and from the inside.

-- Jennifer Kelly

Vintage International is a unit of Random House.