Three unusual men are at the heart of Parallel Stories: Hans von Wolkenstein, whose German mother is linked to secrets of fascist-Nazi collaboration during the 1940s; Ágost Lippay Lehr, whose influential father has served Hungary’s different political regimes for decades; and András Rott, who has his own dark record of mysterious activities abroad. The web of extended and interconnected dramas reaches from 1989 back to the spring of 1939, when Europe trembled on the edge of war, and extends to the bestial times of 1944–45, when Budapest was besieged, the Final Solution devastated Hungary’s Jews, and the war came to an end, and on to the cataclysmic Hungarian Revolution of October 1956. We follow these men from Berlin and Moscow to Switzerland and Holland, from the Mediterranean to the North Sea, and of course, from village to city in Hungary. The social and political circumstances of their lives may vary greatly, their sexual and spiritual longings may seem to each of them entirely unique, yet Péter Nádas’s magnificent tapestry unveils uncanny reverberating parallels that link them across time and space.This is Péter Nádas’s masterpiece—eighteen years in the writing, a sensation in Hungary even before it was published, and almost four years in the translating. Parallel Stories is the first foreign translation of this daring, demanding, and momentous novel, and it confirms for an even larger audience what Hungary already knows: that it is the author’s greatest work.
Parallel Stories: A Novel
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Book Description
A New York Times Notable Book for 2011
In 1989, the year the Wall came down, a university student in Berlin on his morning run finds a corpse on a park bench and alerts the authorities. This scene opens a novel of extraordinary scope and depth, a masterwork that traces the fate of myriad Europeans—Hungarians, Jews, Germans, Gypsies—across the treacherous years of the mid-twentieth century.
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Editorial Reviews
Review
"A hugely ambitious, breathtakingly inventive and at times maddeningly dense novel intent on obliterating historical, geographical, literary and structural borders. "Parallel" doesn't really begin to describe how these stories interact with one another. They converge and diverge; they overlap; they crisscross, loop around and double back on one another, resulting in a defiantly nonlinear novel that attempts the daunting feat of recreating the fragmented, and perhaps even shell-shocked experience of living in Hungary during the 20th century."—Adam Langer, The New York Times
"A robust epic of a Mitteleuropa lurching out of totalitarianism into whatever passes for modern society . . . Hungarian novelist Nádas' stories are parallel in just the sense that Plutarch's lives are: They draw the reader to a moralizing conclusion . . . Nádas' book is as sexually fraught as anything by Kundera . . . War is a constant as friends drift apart and come back together over the decades; sometimes the characters have names and addresses, other times they are nearly anonymous figures swept up in events, such as one Gypsy prisoner of war called "the man with the glasses." Each character's life overlaps with another's, not always neatly. Nádas is forgiving of their many frailties . . . but in the end, under the rumble of artillery fire and the crush of history, all that is left of their lives—and ours—is "the ethereal shadows of poplars." A pensive, beautifully written tour de force of modern European literature, worthy of shelving alongside Döblin, Pasternak and Mann."—Kirkus Reviews
About the Author
Péter Nádas was born in Budapest in 1942. Among his works translated into English are the novels A Book of Memories (FSG, 1997), The End of a Family Story (FSG, 1998), and Love (FSG, 2000); a collection of stories and essays, Fire and Knowledge (FSG, 2007); and two pieces of short fiction, A Lovely Tale of Photography and Péter Nádas: Own Death. He lives with his wife in Gombosszeg, Hungary.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
63 of 69 people found the following review helpful
By D. Moulton
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
I find it difficult to talk dispassionately about Nadas. I'm afraid this review may be over personal and self-indulgent. Please excuse me.
About two years ago I first discovered A Book of Memories. What attracted me was the extremely high praise from one Susan Sontag: "The greatest novel of our time, and one of the great books of our century." Of course I took this with a dose of skepticism at first, but as I read I was shocked to find that what seemed like hyperbole turned out to be merely accurate. Memories changed my understanding of what literature is capable of doing. It also changed the way I see the physical world, particularly the world of the body. The copy I own is marked up and battered from over-use. I've read it twice from cover to cover and have developed a regular practice of opening it to a passage at random and reading for insight and inspiration. It's never disappointed me...
Which is all to say that my expectations could not have possibly been higher for Parallel Stories. I read it in a white heat over the course of two weeks. I finished a few nights ago at 3 in the morning and once I had finished I could do nothing but wander around San Francisco in a dazed stupor. In short, I was not disappointed. If Sontag were still alive she'd probably have to qualify her earlier judgment.
To expand a little... Parallel Stories is a very different book from its predecessor. Despite being much longer, on the whole this one is far less dense. Memories is a book of an almost unbearably intense inwardness; disregarding the author's disclaimer, it does seem to have been at least partly autobiographical (a quick investigation into Peter Nadas's life reveals that his father really did kill himself and his mother did die of cancer). By contrast, PS appears to be a prodigious work of imagination and research. The scope is much broader, there are many more characters, settings, subplots, etc., and this time there is no single, obsessive consciousness through which everything is filtered. In Memories absolutely nothing is taken for granted: every emotion and physical act is described as if it were happening for the first time in human history. By contrast, in PS you do occasionally come across simple declarative sentences.
Instead of digging as deep as possible into a man's thoughts and feelings, here Nadas works through counter-point and external juxtaposition. He gives us a multitude of people whose lives intertwine and reverberate through space and time. In this respect it reminded me of both Underworld and 2666. Like both of these books, PS is partly a historical novel which tries to make sense of both recent events and the whole arch of horror in the 20th century. Yet Nadas is a great original. His vision is entirely his own. No less than in Memories, he is still the writer of the body. History is a force which acts on individual bodies. Not that he neglects consciousness, but the mind is always presented in close relation to the physical apparatus in which it dwells.
Parallel Stories is an extremely brutal book. Scenes of torture and mutilation slip into stunning descriptions of physical love and vice versa. The effect is a little like a Francis Bacon painting. Nadas is a master of pleasure and pain and the porous membrane between the two. For example, the last chapter of Volume II, "The Last Judgment," is a love story set in Buchenwald. I can barely imagine the audacity required to write such a thing, but Nadas's boldness is fully justified by his harrowing achievement. He is able to represent suffering without becoming either sentimental or callous. Similarly, while the book is often extremely raunchy (see the chapter "Informed of Her Own Existence," maybe the best-ever depiction of gay cruising), Nadas manages to endow profundity on the most pornographic detail. He seems equally interested in everything that can be physically experienced and endured. Thus a bad case of diarrhea comes to seem like an event of world historical importance. A young gay boy's sexual adventures become inextricably linked to the sight of mutilated pedestrians in war-ravaged Budapest. And the reader becomes linked to all of it. Like Memories, reading this book is an incomparably intimate experience.
Though many of the book's chapters can be read on their own this is not a collection of stories but a unified work of art. Though it does contain a plot with a fairly conventional resolution, it ultimately achieves its unity more in the matter of poetry than fiction. The book ends with a prose poem, a young man watches something unfold but instead of that something itself Nadas gives a description of the play of light on water; for all that he has described and made us witness in the past 1152 pages he finally must bow before the unspeakable. Like the oeuvre of Wallace Stevens, these parallel stories remain notes towards a supreme, unrealizable fiction. If you let him Nadas will take you to the limit of literary art.
About two years ago I first discovered A Book of Memories. What attracted me was the extremely high praise from one Susan Sontag: "The greatest novel of our time, and one of the great books of our century." Of course I took this with a dose of skepticism at first, but as I read I was shocked to find that what seemed like hyperbole turned out to be merely accurate. Memories changed my understanding of what literature is capable of doing. It also changed the way I see the physical world, particularly the world of the body. The copy I own is marked up and battered from over-use. I've read it twice from cover to cover and have developed a regular practice of opening it to a passage at random and reading for insight and inspiration. It's never disappointed me...
Which is all to say that my expectations could not have possibly been higher for Parallel Stories. I read it in a white heat over the course of two weeks. I finished a few nights ago at 3 in the morning and once I had finished I could do nothing but wander around San Francisco in a dazed stupor. In short, I was not disappointed. If Sontag were still alive she'd probably have to qualify her earlier judgment.
To expand a little... Parallel Stories is a very different book from its predecessor. Despite being much longer, on the whole this one is far less dense. Memories is a book of an almost unbearably intense inwardness; disregarding the author's disclaimer, it does seem to have been at least partly autobiographical (a quick investigation into Peter Nadas's life reveals that his father really did kill himself and his mother did die of cancer). By contrast, PS appears to be a prodigious work of imagination and research. The scope is much broader, there are many more characters, settings, subplots, etc., and this time there is no single, obsessive consciousness through which everything is filtered. In Memories absolutely nothing is taken for granted: every emotion and physical act is described as if it were happening for the first time in human history. By contrast, in PS you do occasionally come across simple declarative sentences.
Instead of digging as deep as possible into a man's thoughts and feelings, here Nadas works through counter-point and external juxtaposition. He gives us a multitude of people whose lives intertwine and reverberate through space and time. In this respect it reminded me of both Underworld and 2666. Like both of these books, PS is partly a historical novel which tries to make sense of both recent events and the whole arch of horror in the 20th century. Yet Nadas is a great original. His vision is entirely his own. No less than in Memories, he is still the writer of the body. History is a force which acts on individual bodies. Not that he neglects consciousness, but the mind is always presented in close relation to the physical apparatus in which it dwells.
Parallel Stories is an extremely brutal book. Scenes of torture and mutilation slip into stunning descriptions of physical love and vice versa. The effect is a little like a Francis Bacon painting. Nadas is a master of pleasure and pain and the porous membrane between the two. For example, the last chapter of Volume II, "The Last Judgment," is a love story set in Buchenwald. I can barely imagine the audacity required to write such a thing, but Nadas's boldness is fully justified by his harrowing achievement. He is able to represent suffering without becoming either sentimental or callous. Similarly, while the book is often extremely raunchy (see the chapter "Informed of Her Own Existence," maybe the best-ever depiction of gay cruising), Nadas manages to endow profundity on the most pornographic detail. He seems equally interested in everything that can be physically experienced and endured. Thus a bad case of diarrhea comes to seem like an event of world historical importance. A young gay boy's sexual adventures become inextricably linked to the sight of mutilated pedestrians in war-ravaged Budapest. And the reader becomes linked to all of it. Like Memories, reading this book is an incomparably intimate experience.
Though many of the book's chapters can be read on their own this is not a collection of stories but a unified work of art. Though it does contain a plot with a fairly conventional resolution, it ultimately achieves its unity more in the matter of poetry than fiction. The book ends with a prose poem, a young man watches something unfold but instead of that something itself Nadas gives a description of the play of light on water; for all that he has described and made us witness in the past 1152 pages he finally must bow before the unspeakable. Like the oeuvre of Wallace Stevens, these parallel stories remain notes towards a supreme, unrealizable fiction. If you let him Nadas will take you to the limit of literary art.
24 of 25 people found the following review helpful
By las cosas
Format:Hardcover
I haven't been as impressed by a newly published book since Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project appeared a decade ago. And similar to Arcades, this is an almost endless swirl of information, in this case taking the form of stories.
It is difficult to convey the length and complexity of this book. At 1150 pages is seems three times the length of the last novel I read, Murakami's 1Q84 that clocking in at 944 pages. The sentences and vocabulary are rather straight forward. The publisher is FSG, not for example, Dalkey. But this is a universe where the surface layers of the intertwining stories that slowly unfold are juxtaposed by a relentless set of internal monologues that swirl around, over and down...ceaselessly down into the murky world of the subconscious and often violent emotions. This makes for an exceedingly exhausting reading experience. Though at least for this reader the exhaustion was coupled by the exhilaration of the incredible use of language and complexity of the world he creates. A fictional world firmly tethered to history.
Originally published in Hungarian and translated by Imre Goldstein, Nadas' long time translator, I can only praise the two as one being, a single voice. The book is a relentless set of juxtapositions, and the use of language is an integral part of this. One character pursues, stalks another through the street of Budapest. When they meet the stalker thinks to himself what is and isn't "nice." The use of this word in the fraught scene is both trite and offensive. We are seeing the great chasm between what we see and what the characters are thinking, and the hyper-sensitive use of language accentuates these distinctions.
The book consists of 3 volumes divided into 39 chapters. Chapters generally start by describing something at middle distance, but without giving the names of any of the characters, or where/when the scene takes place. As the book continues the scenes are increasingly familiar, but particularly in the early chapters the reader has no idea what she is seeing, no context for the scene described. As individual chapters unfold the landscape changes from a factual, almost photographic view to an interior monologue and often stream of consciousness exploration of the thoughts and emotions of that character. Almost without exception these interior vs exterior explorations concern two characters, an ever shifting coupling of the book's characters, and these explorations are continued by the author at a claustrophobic closeness for as long as it takes for the author to complete the coupling. The scenes can include sex, food, drink, arguments; it barely matters. The purpose is to throw the two together and explore the subterranean worlds of the two, both individually and as a couple. Nadas uses laughter to bridge these two worlds. Not humor, there is very little humor in this book, and the little that exists is very dry; no laughter as a physical, involuntary response. When the thoughts of a character are at odds with the conversation, action or scene there is often an inability of the character to be fully present, to overcome the subconscious world. This inability is often bridged with nervous laughter.
There are hundreds of scenes described in this book, and many of them are horrific. It would have been easy to overwhelm the reader with the wrenching miserableness of these, to reduce the reader to tears. But Nadas has set himself a much more difficult task, to mute the scenes as seen through the mind of the characters who lived through them. Several characters had fathers taken off one day, never to return. We do not see this occurring, we often do not really know what happened to these fathers. We only see the event as a loss in the eyes of the children, a loss that can never be explained or healed. And this ever present loss is starkly and hauntingly conveyed to the reader. While the world sees Kristof as wealthy, beautiful and well-mannered, we see the chaos in his soul, and his desperate need to belong, to be loved. The impossibility of this is achingly conveyed to the reader.
My one rather large complaint about this book is the author's disinterest in the reader. Some of the internal explorations of duos go on way too long and at some point the reader is merely numb with the endless battering. The worst example of this is surely the sex between Agost and Gyongyver in Mrs. Szemzo's apartment. But I have never read a perfect novel, so I am certainly willing to forgive Nadas for his compulsion to push further than necessary.
What turns this novel from the well plotted and beautifully written to a masterpiece is the play of history and its impact on everyone throughout the book. Taking place between 1937 and 1989, mostly in Budapest, it struggles with the impact on Hungary of the Germans and fascism as well as the Soviets and communism. Many historical figures from Germany and especially Hungary from the 19th and 20th century, well footnoted, remind the reader of the historic complexity of this land. Characters lament that their country is no longer inhabited by "pure" Hungarians, and by that they mean both the presence of Jews and gypsies and the lingering shame and sorrow of the loses to the Ottoman Empire half a millennium previously.
Every character is warped by his or her prejudices and the prejudices that others have of him or her. A young architect is humiliated by a wealthy client, but in another setting we see that this client embarrasses and disgusts him because she is Jewish. Hungarians are proud of their nationality, but also jealous, zealous, in protecting the purity of their blood from contamination, whether from Germans, gypsies or Jews.
A German war hero from WWI works selflessly and tirelessly in the institute to which his government has assigned him. Almost in passing we learn this is concerned with eugenics, and that the ability to perform this 'important' study has been immensely helped by the availability of the camps. In passing we learn that he is Joseph Mengele's boss.
On the surface no character is heinous, and most are sympathetic. Under the surface each is simultaneously more and less, and in the end this endless swirl of parallel stories left this reader with the exhausted certainty that we all have the ability hidden within ourselves to be a creature far removed from our logical rational selves that we show the world. Each has been damaged psychologically, and who knows what will erupt from that volcano.
There is almost no closure in these intertwining stories. Does Madzar go to the United States? Does Kristof ever find a place for himself? What exactly has Carl Dohring done, and why? Does Gyongyver settle down, and does she even want to? What about Simon and Klara? And Agost, who simply walks off the page? Lingering over the entire book is the question...what about Hungary? With this complex history, what will she do after the Soviets leave, how will her story be written. Obviously this story is still unfolding, but the book was an excellent reminder to this US citizen that history and memory is much more complex than we in our corner of the world imagine.
QUESTION: For those who have read this book, what do you think of the publisher's blurb that the heart of the book is the story of three men: Hans von Wolkenstein, Ágost Lippay Lehr, and András Rott. I find that a rather odd simplification of both the cast of characters and the supposed core of the book, but I'd love to hear what others think in the comments section.
It is difficult to convey the length and complexity of this book. At 1150 pages is seems three times the length of the last novel I read, Murakami's 1Q84 that clocking in at 944 pages. The sentences and vocabulary are rather straight forward. The publisher is FSG, not for example, Dalkey. But this is a universe where the surface layers of the intertwining stories that slowly unfold are juxtaposed by a relentless set of internal monologues that swirl around, over and down...ceaselessly down into the murky world of the subconscious and often violent emotions. This makes for an exceedingly exhausting reading experience. Though at least for this reader the exhaustion was coupled by the exhilaration of the incredible use of language and complexity of the world he creates. A fictional world firmly tethered to history.
Originally published in Hungarian and translated by Imre Goldstein, Nadas' long time translator, I can only praise the two as one being, a single voice. The book is a relentless set of juxtapositions, and the use of language is an integral part of this. One character pursues, stalks another through the street of Budapest. When they meet the stalker thinks to himself what is and isn't "nice." The use of this word in the fraught scene is both trite and offensive. We are seeing the great chasm between what we see and what the characters are thinking, and the hyper-sensitive use of language accentuates these distinctions.
The book consists of 3 volumes divided into 39 chapters. Chapters generally start by describing something at middle distance, but without giving the names of any of the characters, or where/when the scene takes place. As the book continues the scenes are increasingly familiar, but particularly in the early chapters the reader has no idea what she is seeing, no context for the scene described. As individual chapters unfold the landscape changes from a factual, almost photographic view to an interior monologue and often stream of consciousness exploration of the thoughts and emotions of that character. Almost without exception these interior vs exterior explorations concern two characters, an ever shifting coupling of the book's characters, and these explorations are continued by the author at a claustrophobic closeness for as long as it takes for the author to complete the coupling. The scenes can include sex, food, drink, arguments; it barely matters. The purpose is to throw the two together and explore the subterranean worlds of the two, both individually and as a couple. Nadas uses laughter to bridge these two worlds. Not humor, there is very little humor in this book, and the little that exists is very dry; no laughter as a physical, involuntary response. When the thoughts of a character are at odds with the conversation, action or scene there is often an inability of the character to be fully present, to overcome the subconscious world. This inability is often bridged with nervous laughter.
There are hundreds of scenes described in this book, and many of them are horrific. It would have been easy to overwhelm the reader with the wrenching miserableness of these, to reduce the reader to tears. But Nadas has set himself a much more difficult task, to mute the scenes as seen through the mind of the characters who lived through them. Several characters had fathers taken off one day, never to return. We do not see this occurring, we often do not really know what happened to these fathers. We only see the event as a loss in the eyes of the children, a loss that can never be explained or healed. And this ever present loss is starkly and hauntingly conveyed to the reader. While the world sees Kristof as wealthy, beautiful and well-mannered, we see the chaos in his soul, and his desperate need to belong, to be loved. The impossibility of this is achingly conveyed to the reader.
My one rather large complaint about this book is the author's disinterest in the reader. Some of the internal explorations of duos go on way too long and at some point the reader is merely numb with the endless battering. The worst example of this is surely the sex between Agost and Gyongyver in Mrs. Szemzo's apartment. But I have never read a perfect novel, so I am certainly willing to forgive Nadas for his compulsion to push further than necessary.
What turns this novel from the well plotted and beautifully written to a masterpiece is the play of history and its impact on everyone throughout the book. Taking place between 1937 and 1989, mostly in Budapest, it struggles with the impact on Hungary of the Germans and fascism as well as the Soviets and communism. Many historical figures from Germany and especially Hungary from the 19th and 20th century, well footnoted, remind the reader of the historic complexity of this land. Characters lament that their country is no longer inhabited by "pure" Hungarians, and by that they mean both the presence of Jews and gypsies and the lingering shame and sorrow of the loses to the Ottoman Empire half a millennium previously.
Every character is warped by his or her prejudices and the prejudices that others have of him or her. A young architect is humiliated by a wealthy client, but in another setting we see that this client embarrasses and disgusts him because she is Jewish. Hungarians are proud of their nationality, but also jealous, zealous, in protecting the purity of their blood from contamination, whether from Germans, gypsies or Jews.
A German war hero from WWI works selflessly and tirelessly in the institute to which his government has assigned him. Almost in passing we learn this is concerned with eugenics, and that the ability to perform this 'important' study has been immensely helped by the availability of the camps. In passing we learn that he is Joseph Mengele's boss.
On the surface no character is heinous, and most are sympathetic. Under the surface each is simultaneously more and less, and in the end this endless swirl of parallel stories left this reader with the exhausted certainty that we all have the ability hidden within ourselves to be a creature far removed from our logical rational selves that we show the world. Each has been damaged psychologically, and who knows what will erupt from that volcano.
There is almost no closure in these intertwining stories. Does Madzar go to the United States? Does Kristof ever find a place for himself? What exactly has Carl Dohring done, and why? Does Gyongyver settle down, and does she even want to? What about Simon and Klara? And Agost, who simply walks off the page? Lingering over the entire book is the question...what about Hungary? With this complex history, what will she do after the Soviets leave, how will her story be written. Obviously this story is still unfolding, but the book was an excellent reminder to this US citizen that history and memory is much more complex than we in our corner of the world imagine.
QUESTION: For those who have read this book, what do you think of the publisher's blurb that the heart of the book is the story of three men: Hans von Wolkenstein, Ágost Lippay Lehr, and András Rott. I find that a rather odd simplification of both the cast of characters and the supposed core of the book, but I'd love to hear what others think in the comments section.
27 of 31 people found the following review helpful
By Zach Holden
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
I came to this novel with high expectations and the novel met those expectations for about 200 pages. The early press on the book promised that Nadas had managed to 'redefine' the possibility of the novel and that Imre Goldstein's translation would be gorgeous. I found that the latter was more reliably true than the former; the prose varied between good and great while Nadas formal innovations were barely innovations.
I'll start with my major problem with the book: it isn't as ambitious as it thinks it is. For all of the comparisons to the classics of European literature such as War and Peace or Magic Mountain, I find that the closest analogue is actually the contemporary American classic Infinite Jest. The obvious similarity is the sheer size of both texts, but the two actually share similar ambitions and similar form. Nadas is trying to make sense of the European experience in the twentieth century before 1989 while Wallace was trying to make sense of the American experience after 1989. I have trouble taking seriously the claims that Nadas makes great formal innovations mostly because almost everything he does here was done better by Wallace. Wallace compared IJ to a fractal in that the novel expressed it's overarching themes through the repetition of those themes over and over again in smaller constituent parts; Nadas is up to something very similar here in his use of the vaguely related parallel stories that give the novel it's title, in that each story repeats the themes of the novel as a whole while creating an web of connections that a careful reader easily grasps. Similarly, both Wallace and Nadas make the decision to push the plot out of the written text. By this I mean that both authors force the reader to connect the dots based on limited information and educated guesses. Nadas has said he wanted to create a novel which is a monument to incompleteness, but Wallace already did this. The strength of Infinite Jest is that Wallace's novel is complete in it's incompleteness- it suggests that Wallace could have written another thousand pages to tell the whole story, but at the same time a careful reader can actually figure out where the plot goes after the text ends. Nadas tries the same thing but only lets the reader solve the puzzles that they don't want to solve. Finally, both texts shift back and forth between styles based on the characters being described, and this is hardly unique to either- pretty much every postmodern author has played with the idea of shifting between genres and styles within a text. I have trouble labeling a text formally innovative when it
My complaints with the formal 'innovations' of Nadas is that he doesn't do it well. First, his parallel stories are hardly parallel at all, which strains credulity. I can understand when it's revealed, for example, two Jewish aristocrats of the same age in Budapest knew each other. But it gets annoying when Nadas goes out of his way to make sure that every character has some link to each other. A cab-driver eavesdropping on two of the characters just happens to be a major character from another part of the novel. Really? In particular, he undercuts the his formal decisions in the last two chapters (where he swerves away from a neat conclusion and starts telling new stories) by arbitrarily making one of the characters the stepfather of one of the central characters of the book.
The biggest problem with Parallel Stories form is that it can't justify its own length. He hammers home parallels when merely suggesting them would have likely gotten the job done. He gives character's stories two or three chapters when he said everything unique about them in one. Further, he hammers themes again and again to the point where I felt he was almost insulting my intelligence. In an 1100 page novel it gets old fast when the author clearly states his basic point (that animal drives to eat, copulate and defecate exist parallel to our 'higher' lives of identity and politics and that totalitarianism can only be understood by looking at both aspects of man) almost every 60 pages.
Honestly, I also had problems with Nadas' hammering home of sex scenes. It's not that they weren't well written, but that it just got old. I always try and sell my less literary peers on Haruki Murakami by pointing out that whenever Murakami gets too caught up in Jungian psychology or poststructural philosophy he grounds himself with some wholesome smut, but Nadas takes this to a whole other level. It seems he can't go 5 pages without talking about somebody's foreskin; one reviewer compared the novel to having your face shoved into someone's crotch and I have to agree.
None of this is to say Nadas is not occasionally brilliant. The first three chapters are amongst the best I've ever read, and there are instances in which Nadas actually does do something formally daring- in particular I loved the way he revealed who the dreamer was in the first book through an abrupt change in perspective. His prose is occasionally genius and I suspect that it was better before translation. Goldstein does an admirable job but there are some clunky moments where she has to note in the text when Hungarian does things that English cannot, such as shifting from formal to informal modes of address. The problem with the novel is that the moments of greatness are drowned out by hundreds upon hundreds of pages of him repeating his thesis in other words and hundreds upon hundreds of pages of him describing foreskin after foreskin after clitoris after vulva ad nauseam (literally). The ulimate sin that Nadas commits is that he breaks the unspoken rule of mammoth books- they need to make it worthwhile to the reader. Writers such as Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Wallace, Pynchon, Proust, or Gaddis can get away with writing huge books because their books reward the reader with prose that is fun to read and plots that make the last 500 pages fly by. Nadas drowns his best prose in a sea of repetition which honestly left me counting the pages to the end, and not in a good way.
I'll start with my major problem with the book: it isn't as ambitious as it thinks it is. For all of the comparisons to the classics of European literature such as War and Peace or Magic Mountain, I find that the closest analogue is actually the contemporary American classic Infinite Jest. The obvious similarity is the sheer size of both texts, but the two actually share similar ambitions and similar form. Nadas is trying to make sense of the European experience in the twentieth century before 1989 while Wallace was trying to make sense of the American experience after 1989. I have trouble taking seriously the claims that Nadas makes great formal innovations mostly because almost everything he does here was done better by Wallace. Wallace compared IJ to a fractal in that the novel expressed it's overarching themes through the repetition of those themes over and over again in smaller constituent parts; Nadas is up to something very similar here in his use of the vaguely related parallel stories that give the novel it's title, in that each story repeats the themes of the novel as a whole while creating an web of connections that a careful reader easily grasps. Similarly, both Wallace and Nadas make the decision to push the plot out of the written text. By this I mean that both authors force the reader to connect the dots based on limited information and educated guesses. Nadas has said he wanted to create a novel which is a monument to incompleteness, but Wallace already did this. The strength of Infinite Jest is that Wallace's novel is complete in it's incompleteness- it suggests that Wallace could have written another thousand pages to tell the whole story, but at the same time a careful reader can actually figure out where the plot goes after the text ends. Nadas tries the same thing but only lets the reader solve the puzzles that they don't want to solve. Finally, both texts shift back and forth between styles based on the characters being described, and this is hardly unique to either- pretty much every postmodern author has played with the idea of shifting between genres and styles within a text. I have trouble labeling a text formally innovative when it
My complaints with the formal 'innovations' of Nadas is that he doesn't do it well. First, his parallel stories are hardly parallel at all, which strains credulity. I can understand when it's revealed, for example, two Jewish aristocrats of the same age in Budapest knew each other. But it gets annoying when Nadas goes out of his way to make sure that every character has some link to each other. A cab-driver eavesdropping on two of the characters just happens to be a major character from another part of the novel. Really? In particular, he undercuts the his formal decisions in the last two chapters (where he swerves away from a neat conclusion and starts telling new stories) by arbitrarily making one of the characters the stepfather of one of the central characters of the book.
The biggest problem with Parallel Stories form is that it can't justify its own length. He hammers home parallels when merely suggesting them would have likely gotten the job done. He gives character's stories two or three chapters when he said everything unique about them in one. Further, he hammers themes again and again to the point where I felt he was almost insulting my intelligence. In an 1100 page novel it gets old fast when the author clearly states his basic point (that animal drives to eat, copulate and defecate exist parallel to our 'higher' lives of identity and politics and that totalitarianism can only be understood by looking at both aspects of man) almost every 60 pages.
Honestly, I also had problems with Nadas' hammering home of sex scenes. It's not that they weren't well written, but that it just got old. I always try and sell my less literary peers on Haruki Murakami by pointing out that whenever Murakami gets too caught up in Jungian psychology or poststructural philosophy he grounds himself with some wholesome smut, but Nadas takes this to a whole other level. It seems he can't go 5 pages without talking about somebody's foreskin; one reviewer compared the novel to having your face shoved into someone's crotch and I have to agree.
None of this is to say Nadas is not occasionally brilliant. The first three chapters are amongst the best I've ever read, and there are instances in which Nadas actually does do something formally daring- in particular I loved the way he revealed who the dreamer was in the first book through an abrupt change in perspective. His prose is occasionally genius and I suspect that it was better before translation. Goldstein does an admirable job but there are some clunky moments where she has to note in the text when Hungarian does things that English cannot, such as shifting from formal to informal modes of address. The problem with the novel is that the moments of greatness are drowned out by hundreds upon hundreds of pages of him repeating his thesis in other words and hundreds upon hundreds of pages of him describing foreskin after foreskin after clitoris after vulva ad nauseam (literally). The ulimate sin that Nadas commits is that he breaks the unspoken rule of mammoth books- they need to make it worthwhile to the reader. Writers such as Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Wallace, Pynchon, Proust, or Gaddis can get away with writing huge books because their books reward the reader with prose that is fun to read and plots that make the last 500 pages fly by. Nadas drowns his best prose in a sea of repetition which honestly left me counting the pages to the end, and not in a good way.
Most Recent Customer Reviews
1.0 out of 5 stars
goulash realism
I bought this novel after it was breathlessly reviewed in the New York Times as "a defiantly nonlinear novel that attempts the daunting feat of recreating the fragmented, and... Read more
Published 3 months ago by W. Schimmerling
4.0 out of 5 stars
I don't know why I finished this book...
First, I have given Parallel Stories four stars because Amazon requires a star rating and, whatever else it may be, this is a major work of fiction. Read more
Published 4 months ago by James Yarnall
4.0 out of 5 stars
Too difficult for me
I just finished "Parallel Stories" and I have to say it was a grind. Nothing about the book is easy: from its enormous length, thru the dozens of characters and the lack of... Read more
Published 4 months ago by wbjonesjr1
2.0 out of 5 stars
This Book is Way Too Long
I think I originally got this book because I heard a lot of good buzz, about how this was in the making for over a decade, how it's one of the longest books ever written, and how... Read more
Published 4 months ago by Ruvym Gilman
1.0 out of 5 stars
self indulgent
I consider myself an educated individual (university professor). I read a lot of international authors whose works are translated into English. Read more
Published 5 months ago by T. Schwalbe
5.0 out of 5 stars
brilliant
Nadas is an incredible writer and this novel displays his talents in a thousand ways. Parallel Stories is a wonderful example of post-modern brilliance.
Published 5 months ago by David C. Cain
5.0 out of 5 stars
Wrings the Neck of the Soul. A Masterpiece.
The war in Parallel Stories is not waged on the battlefield, (in fact, though pre-and-post-and-present WWII Europe is very much the stage, it never rears its hydra-head explicitly)... Read more
Published 16 months ago by porterja
