Dangerous Games.(Sandor Marai)(Biography)

Sandor Marai keeps getting younger. Twelve years after he committed suicide, in 1989, at the age of eighty-nine, Knopf published the first American edition of his novel "Embers," which had originally appeared in Hungary when he was forty-two. That launched Marai's career in this country. Three years later came "Casanova in Bolzano," written when he was forty. Now, courtesy of George Szirtes, we have the first English translation of "The Rebels" (Knopf; $24.95), Marai's fourth novel, published when he was only thirty. It's a darkly comic, war-ravaged coming-of-age tale that displays much of the genius visible in his later works, but it's also funnier and more extravagantly ...