Translated by Carol Brown Janeway.  Sandor Marai's lustrous novel about an adulterous affair in turn-of-the-century Austria-Hungary could be taken for a jeweled antique, with its setting on a vast Hungarian estate and in Vienna's imperial establishment, its powerful undercurrent of suspense and its elegantly wrought armature of moral and metaphysical argument.  ''Embers'' was published in 1942 in Budapest -- a poor time and place for polished considerations, let alone for getting them noticed anywhere else. The author, a leading Hungarian writer, died in obscure exile in the United States in 1989: ''Embers'' was only recently rediscovered in Europe, and now it has been translated (with stylish bite, by Carol Brown Janeway) into English.  Marai shared an era and an imperial Mitteleuropa heritage with two supreme artificers of the link between individual decadence and world crackup: the Austrians Robert Musil and Joseph Roth. And there is a climactic moment in ''Embers'' that proclaims just such a connection (rougher and less nuanced, perhaps) between private fibrillation and universal infarction. The deceived husband, a former Austrian general, receives Konrad, his deceiver and onetime bosom friend and fellow officer, for a confrontation he has broodingly prepared through 40 years of separation and silence.  The estate's magnificent dining room is opened (the general has long lived a hermit's life in a bare attic room), footmen in livery newly unmothballed serve up a lavish meal and the talk goes on through the night. Talk of a peculiar kind: a virtually unbroken peroration by the general, seeking to denounce and punish the injury done him by friend and wife (dead for 20 years); and, more formidably and agonizingly, to understand it.  But the injury is larger than personal: like Job, the general is dealing not with boils but with God. Through Konrad, he questions his own place and fate in the cosmos. As with Camus's philosophical novels, Strindberg's one-act play ''The Stronger'' and Dostoyevsky's Grand Inquisitor sequence, it is a shattering dialogue between speaker and silence (or here, near-silence). The general's speech is the tormented seeking of one proud and crippled soul; but at a crucial point the torment swells to take account of the breaking of nations -- it is 1939 -- for the second time in two decades.  ''Perhaps this entire way of life which we have known since birth, this house, this dinner, even the words we have used this evening to discuss the questions of our lives, perhaps they all belong to the past. There's too much tension, too much animosity, too much craving for revenge in us all,'' the general, punishingly expansive, tells his punitively mute guest, not long before dawn and stiff exhaustion bring their septuagenarian duel to an end.  ''We look inside ourselves and what do we find? An animosity that time damped down for a while but now is bursting out again. So why should we expect anything else of our fellow men? And you and I, too, old and wise, at the end of our lives, we, too, want revenge. . . . Why should we expect better of the world, when it teems with unconscious desires and their all-too-deliberate consequences, and young men are bayoneting the hands of young men of other nations, and strangers are hacking each other's backs to ribbons, and all rules and conventions have been voided and instinct rules, and the universe is on fire?''  Thus Marai, and the link between what went on within the ruling heights of a society and what was to collapse it. But the passage, though it provides thematic edge, is only one aspect of a story that draws a vivid psychological portrait of its narrator while employing a musical command of motifs, variations, tempos and cadences.  Indeed it begins with an anticipatory trumpet flourish. The general's routine -- we get the heaviness of a solitary old man administering a sunless kingdom -- is broken by the arrival of a letter. Instantly all is bustle: orders are given for the coach to be polished and the coachman arrayed to fetch the announced visitor, for the ancient dust-covers to be removed in the banquet hall, for the same candles, service, food and wine to be produced that were last brought out 40 years before.  We are quickly told that it was the last meal shared by the general, his incandescent wife, Krisztina, and Konrad before the latter -- until then a thrice-weekly visitor -- decamped abroad. We are told that there was a hunting incident earlier that day. We are told little else but it's enough: the author has issued a narrative lottery ticket that keeps us breathless for the drawing that will occur in the course of the nightlong confrontation.  Before Konrad's arrival we learn about the general's childhood as the frail son of an Imperial Guards captain much favored by the emperor and the artistic and musical wife he brought back from Paris to live on his wild Hungarian estate, a place of wolves and hunting. ''In our country feelings are more intense and more decisive,'' the captain cautioned his bride; the emperor warned her she'd married a bear (an honorable one).
EMBERS   By Sandor Marai.   Translated by Carol Brown Janeway.   213 pp. New York:   Alfred A. Knopf. $21.