A Book of Memories [Mass Market Paperback]

Peter Nadas (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 21, 1998

First published in Hungary in 1986 after a five-year battle with censors, A Book of Memories is both a confessional autobiographical novel and psychological inquest into the repressed nightmares of Europe's recent past.

The novel revolves around several multilayered, elaborately linked narratives. The first, set against the backdrop of 1970s East Berlin, is that of an emotionally tormented young Hungarian writer who is enmeshed in an amorous triad with a German poet and an aging temperamental actress. The second narrative is a novel the narrator is composing about a turn-of-the-century German aesthete, whose anti-bourgeois transgressions and hypersensitivity mirror those of his creator. A final voice is that of a childhood friend who, after the narrator's death, offers his own perspective on their friendship and on the events that shaped their lives.

With a hypnotic attention to sensuous detail conveyed in a prose as lush as it is elegantly precise, Pter Ndas's work is certain to endure both as a brilliant inquiry into the varieties of sexual, artistic, and political passion, and as an important moral expression of the public and private soul of twentieth-century Europe.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

A Book of Memories is a novel within a novel. The outer shell of Hungarian author Peter Nadas's ambitious tale concerns a nameless Hungarian writer and his ménage à trois with an aging actress and a younger man in East Germany. While the contemporary writer's own story unfolds, he is busily at work on an historical novel about a German novelist named Thomas Thoenissen. As if a novel about a novelist writing about a novelist wasn't confusing enough, the two fictional writers have a great deal in common, including an unnatural affection for their mothers and a predilection for bisexual triangles. Throw into this already heady brew a great deal of Eastern European cold-war politics, and it becomes obvious that A Book of Memories requires a serious commitment from the reader.

Moving in time between the old Stalinist era and post-communist Eastern Europe, Peter Nadas convincingly conveys the effects of communism, both as it happened and as it collapsed. In his unnamed narrator he creates a perfect conduit between two times; the narrator grew up in a privileged communist family, the son of the state prosecutor in a Stalinist regime. In chronicling the boy's passage from child to man, Nadas paints a vivid portrait of the secrecy, fear, and tension in a society in which the personal and the political are often one and the same. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Library Journal

Published in Budapest in 1985 (and later in several languages), this powerful autobiographical novel is Nadas's first appearance in English. In the tradition of Proust, he has composed a psychological work that celebrates the primacy of emotions, discriminating between shades of feeling and exploring the deepest currents of relationship among his characters along with their physical, sexual, and political aspects. A young, hypersensitive Hungarian writer recalls his uneasy Budapest childhood and his Seventies sojourn in East Berlin, where he worked closely with a famous, emotionally unstable actress whose sometime lover, a German poet, became the love of his life; interspersed are chapters from a novel he is writing about a 19th-century German writer whose passions and experiences mirror his own. This rewarding but demanding work, ideal for readers with the leisure and appetite for rich, intensive analysis and fine literary craftsmanship, is essential for for all collections of significant contemporary literature.?Sister M. Anna Falbo, Villa Maria Coll. Lib., Buffalo,
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback: 720 pages
• Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics) (September 21, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0140275673
• ISBN-13: 978-0140275674
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.3 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,476,192 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

22 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Exposing the Soul During a Historical Turning Point, January 29, 2005

By 

Erika Borsos "pepper flower" (Gulf Coast of FL, USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: A Book of Memories (Hardcover)

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)

20 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good but difficult, October 30, 1999

By 

Douglas Turnbull (Fallston, MD USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Book of Memories (Hardcover)

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.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Well-written and sensually charged . . ., July 29, 2001

By 

"hobbs13" (Austin, Texas United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Book of Memories (Mass Market Paperback)

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.