A Book of Memories: A Novel

If you enjoyed Proust or Musil you will gravitate to Nadas' great novel. Belongs on any short list of the best of 20th century Europe.

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?

Make no mistake: this book is a difficult read. It took me 6 months! I wrote out charts of names and got lost in his pages and pages of "sentences" with no periods--only semicolons. Stylistically it's amazingly complex and the style reflects the content. Read it carefully and completely and you'll have a rich, meaningful experience. It's at the top of my top ten list right now.

Not a bad book, though a little hard to read. Nadas writes well, but he's no Proust or Musil, and it's difficult to become engrossed by this story.

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.

Absolutely incredible, one of the best novels I have read in a decade, easily one of the top twenty novels of the past century - shades of Musil and McElroy with a hefty dose of Proust

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 creativeindividual 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.

If you like the work of Joseph Roth, Gregor von Rezzori, Proust or Stefan Zweig, I can't imagine you won't find astonishment and deep pleasure in this book.

One of the best contemporary novelists from Hungary, amazing piece of art work

Excellent. Thank-you.