The novel “Candles Burn Down” by the Hungarian writer Sándor Máray (1900–1989) was first published in 1942, but brought world fame to its author only posthumously, in 1999, when its English and German translations were presented at the Frankfurt Fair. A short but emotionally charged novel, it is essentially a monologue: it is spoken or replayed in the head by the main character, an elderly aristocrat who has invited an old friend whom he has not seen for several decades to dinner at the castle. The story of friendship, love, loyalty and betrayal of specific people in Marai is also a tragic picture of the collapse of the previous world order, a shock that changed the European world and its customary values.