Customer Reviews

A Book of Memories: A Novel

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I was drawn to the cover ... a photo of the Hungarian Parliament building sitting on the edge of the Danube ... surrounded by a fog. Had I listened to the old adage "Don't judge a book by its cover" ... most likely I would *not* have read the book. This is a highly complex and controversial book but *not* as one would expect, because of its political contents, the most probable reason that it was a five year battle with the censors in Hungary before it was permitted to be published. No ... the world has long acknowledged there was repression experienced in Central and Eastern Europe during the post World War II Communist occupation of this region. In fact, many books have been published examining the causes and outcomes of the Hungarian Revolution in 1956. This book is risque because of the highly personal experiences revealed by the sensitive and intelligent main character whose memoirs we are reading. The daring revelations could push people's "buttons", those who make moral judgements about what two consenting adults do during intimate moments, those of the same gender or opposite. Frankly, had I known this was in the book, I would not have bought it. As it stands, the events unfolded gradually and amazingly, I was not shocked, after all, it was the main character's memoirs. The emotional complexity of the novel intertwines on many levels, with many different recollections of life experiences at different ages. The descriptions are highly personal and direct, it is as if we, the reader have a connection to how the character's mind works. The writing is elegant, the emotions are deep, the thoughts are intense ... It is a serious novel written with great attention to detail and texture. The descriptions of people's actions, the interpretation of their feelings and responses shows the author, Peter Nadas to be a man of refined sensitivity and superior intelligence. His description of the personal impact of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 on the lives of everyday people is extremely accurate and most highly impressive. I can say this because my family lived through it. The event divided us by many hundreds of thousands of miles across the Atlantic Ocean ... from our relatives ... although it also created closer emotional ties to our homeland, Hungary.

The book begins when the main character is living in East Berlin, he recalls the topsy turvy life he leads, describing the eccentric people who are his friends ... and his experiences during those turbulent times. The writing is complex because interwoven within the novel are connections to past events when the main character was growing up. We learn of his childhood and friends, who later play major roles in his emotional expiation of life experiences. Overall, this book is recommended for its profound and beautiful writing ... with reservations for those who are puritanical in their tastes about reading very personal intimate revelations. Erika Borsos (erikab93)

I was drawn into reading this book by the comparisons with Proust, which I don't think are really justified. It is a very good book, and has some superficial similarities, but I didn't find the same psychological insight in Nadas that Proust had. Nadas seems to have an exceptionally keen eye for external detail, and has many brilliant descriptions of things, but I don't think he has the same brilliance for interior, psychological details. A simple way to put it would be that where Proust writes about love, Nadas writes about sex.

The book also suffers from overly clever and elliptical story-telling, weaving together two distinct plots (which are confusingly both told in the first person, by very similar narrators), without clear indications of when it switches from one to the other. Nadas also adopts a faulkneresque non-linear narrative style, jumping around in time, which further confuses the issue. A few more concessions to readability would have benefitted the book enormously, in my opinion.

A last comment is that the book's central, climactic events hinge around the Hungarian revolution in 1950, but it assumes the reader already knows all the events of that period. If you don't know the timeline of events and the internal politics of Hungary during this turmoil, you would do well to brush up on it before reading Nadas's work.

I enjoyed this book not only for its complicated plot and rich prose, but also for the way Nadas weaves multiple stories together; I've seen this is most of his other novels where the so-called "plot" becomes entangled with other narrators and other times, sort of like Louise Erdrich on acid. All in all, I love the way he describes sensory material present both in the world and internally, and the way both become ensnared. If you don't like a good, rich, complicated novel, stick to John Grisham.

I decided to review this work in an attempt to counter some of the other tepid responses which, frankly, almost disssuaded me from starting the novel at all. But memories of a rave from Susan Sontag in The New Yorker a number of years ago caused me to persist, and I'm glad I did. This is a major novel -- a long, languid, occasionally frustrating one, granted, but one that nevertheless rewards a persistent reader. It helps to know that there are THREE "I" narrators; it also helps to know a little about Hungary's history, and to have some familiarity with the history of the cold war. While comparisons to Proust and Musil are probably inevitable, they are also a bit misleading, particularly in relation to Musil. What Nadas shares with Proust is his belief in the powers of perception and consciousness, as well as his long, delicate, slowly-unfolding lines. Essentially, this is a novel about the difficulties of finding love, set against the backdrop of 20th-century Hungary's inhospitable history. In particular, it is an audacious and sensitive exploration of sexuality and love, and a truly great novel. It is a must for lovers of great literature, and for those looking for a really masterful dissection of a gay sensibility. I am certain I will never forget it, and feel the way I always do in the presence of true art: enormously grateful to the author for having created it.

In "The New Republic," July 28, 1997, pp. 32-36., Professor Stanislaw Baranczak of Harvard University writes that this..." is very likely the book that you have been awaiting since you read "Remembrance of Things Past," "The Magic Mountain" or "The Man Without Qualities".... "...If a masterpiece is a book that makes us wonder how we could have claimed to understand our own existence before we read it, then Peter Nadas's book is unquestionably a masterpiece."

I have a deep personal connection with this book. It was first published in Hungarian the year of my birth (also the year of Jean Genet's death). The last time I read it I wept continuously; I had just fallen in love, and as far as I'm concerned no one in the history of the novel has ever been better at representing the vicissitude of love, particularly love of the queer variety. Nadas is clearly working in the tradition of James, Musil, Mann, and Proust, but in certain respects he actually surpasses these masters. None ever knew the body as intimately, as poetically as he. This book represents the redemption of lust and adolescent longing as a serious subject for literature. He's able to write about sex without seeming glib, self-indulgent, sensationalistic, or euphemistic; practically all other writers, even the great ones, fall into one of these traps. Like Proust or Dante Nadas creates his own cosmogony - uniquely, his is a universe of human bodies... Aside from the sex, Memories is a book of astonishing political and moral intelligence. Nadas is the least didactic of writers, but even so he is able to infinitely deepen and enrich the reader's understanding of history. The account of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution is simply breathtaking; I would call it a brilliant combination of Marx and Freud (more brilliant, say, than anything to come out of the Frankfurt school), but that would make Nadas sound like a pedantic novelist, when in fact he's anything but... I'm tempted to go on and on. There are so many beautiful descriptions, so many heartrending sequences. (The long chapter "Grass Grew Over the Scorched Spot" could stand alongside Musil's "Young Torless" as one of the great novellas of budding sexuality and intellect in the male adolescent.) I cannot believe this book is not more famous than it is. In my exceedingly humble opinion Nadas is the greatest living novelist in the world today; to find anyone else as great you have to go back to the first half, or even the first third, of the twentieth century.

Read this book!

By the way, does anyone know when Parallel Stories is coming out in English?

An excellent book but lacks the depth of Musil, the exuberance of Joyce and the obssessive dissection of detail that is uniquely Proust...still worth a read.

Monumental work that stands comparison with Proust; It tells of all thr changes in post war Hungary and also paints an almost psychological portrait of an artist"s coming to grips with his life as a MAN, a creative
individual and the events in his life which help him to understand what it means to be human in the 20th century..
An amazing work that shows what it was like in Middle europe after the end of WW 2.

I know that its difficult to read this long novel, but if you read it once, you'll never forget it! This book of Nádas Péter is one of the greatest Hungarian and Europian novel! Its an excellent philosophical, psychical, and historic work, so I recommend it to everyone. I read it in its original language, but I think that the English version is must be great as well. If you like Thomas Mann's, Proust's or Musil's works you will surely enjoy this one.

I read the first page of the book and was at once excited... as I got deeper into it, I felt I was descending into a thick fog. I read on, thinking I might emerge from this fog. I never did. I did not find this book to be a worthwhile read, especially considering its length. I did not learn a great deal about Cold War Hungary or Cold War politics that could not be found elsewhere. The book is almost pretentious, offers no real depth and left me wondering why I bothered. I mean no disrespect to the writer since it was obviously a labour for him to write. It is a solid book, but it failed to engage.