El matarife

The indolent Otto Schwarz is a chilling example of savage abjection: for him, killing animals in a Berlin slaughterhouse or enemy soldiers on the front line makes no difference, but a kind of calling. Sándor Márai has been able to concentrate in a single character the irrepressible psychic disorder that led to the First World War, with the ironic distance and cold conciseness of a chronicler, as something belonging to a new and terrifying normality from which it is impossible to escape unscathed.