The Rebels

The Rebels

by SandorMarai (Author)

Synopsis

It is May 1918, and a group of boys are poised on the brink of adulthood. With war sweeping Europe, theirs has become a ghost town: fathers, uncles and older brothers have been called to the front; the trains that arrive through snow-capped mountains bear the living with the dead. As the boys' graduation looms, so too does their fear of going to fight. Drawn together by the end of all that is familiar, yet repelled by what adulthood has come to represent, a small group of them invent a clandestine world. In their hideaway, with its codes, loves, jealousies, and own elaborate rules, these four test out their frustrations and their fears. Their games are darkly comic, wildly imaginative, increasingly subversive, and they attract the attention of a visitor to the town. By summer's end, their secret is in ruins. "The Rebels" is a story of complicity and betrayal, of youthful exuberance and dawning responsibility. Another rediscovered gem from the great Hungarian author of Embers, it is a haunting novel that traces the experience of friends who confuse growing up with dying and adulthood with war, and are jolted forever from the final, irretrievable summer of their adolescence. "Elegiac, sombre, musical, and gripping, Embers is a brilliant disquisition on friendship" - "Observer".

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Quantity

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More Information

Format: Hardcover
Pages: 288
Edition: Main Market
Publisher: Picador
Published: 05 Oct 2007

ISBN 10: 0330454544
ISBN 13: 9780330454544

Media Reviews
A darkly comic, war-ravaged coming-of-age tale that displays much of the genius visible in his later works, but [is] also funnier and more extravagantly imaginative. -- The New Yorker The emotional power of the story is that of a simple, straightforward narrative . . . followed by stunning revelation. -- The Boston Globe A morbidly comic novel . . . marked by passages of bleak elegiac grandeur. -- The New York Sun
Author Bio
Sandor Marai was born in Kassa, in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in 1900, and died in San Diego, California, in 1989. He rose to fame as one of the leading literary novelists in Hungary in the 1930s. Profoundly anti-fascist, he survived World War II, but persecution by the Communists drwove him from the country in 1948. He went into exile, first in Italy, then in the United States.