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Amazon.co.uk 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 ageing 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 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.
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This extraordinary magnum opus seems at first to be a confessional autobiographical novel in the grand manner, claiming and extending the lagacy of Proust and Mann. A BOOK OF MEMORIES is made up of three first-person narratives: the first that of a young Hungarian writer and his fated love for a German poet; we also learn of the narrator's adolescence in Budapest, when he experiences the downfall of his once upper-class but now pro-Communist family. A second memoir, alternating with the first, is a novel the narrator is composing about a refined Belle Epoque aesthete, whose anti-bourgeois transgressions seem like emotionally overcharged versions of the narrator's own experiences. A third voice is that of a childhood friend who, after the narrator's return to his homeland, offers an apparently more objective account of their friendship. Together these brilliantly coloured lives are inte-grated in a powerful work of tragic intensity.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
A friend of mine gave me this book just before I moved to Hungary (where much of the book is set) to live for a year, and to a large degree my experience of that country is tied up with my feelings about this monumental novel. It took me a long time to read but when I finished I was left with a far-off, remote feeling of quiet sadness and contemplation that only a few of my very favourite books have given me. It is true, the book does require considerable commitment from its readers - it is narrated in an extraordinarily long-winded, Proustian stream-of-consciousness fashion, and the shifts between narrators (there are three), settings and epochs are not always easy to navigate. But the incredible sustained depth of this work, the beauty of its passages, and the genuine pathos that it achieves make it well worth the effort. In "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" Milan Kundera arranges the chronology such that the last section of the book takes place before the middle section, and thus we read about the strivings of the characters with the tragic foreknowledge of their deaths. In Nadas Peter's book this device is carried to a new extreme: The penultimate section of the book is narrated by a childhood friend of the author of the rest of the book, who informs us of the death of this author. The final section is written by the now-dead author and "appended" by his friend as the "keystone" to the whole work. Thus we read the final section with the knowledge that the narrator of this section (written in the first-person) is now dead, and the effect is harrowing. The irony of the book's closing words, coming as they do after a work of colossal length and complexity, brings me to tears every time I read them.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
15 reviews
23 of 24 people found the following review helpful
Exposing the Soul During a Historical Turning Point
29 Jan 2005
Format: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)
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
Good but difficult
30 Oct 1999
Format: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
Well-written and sensually charged . . .
29 July 2001
Format: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.
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