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Parallel Stories, the new novel by Péter Nádas, is a virtuoso combination of nineteenth-century high realism with the experimentalism of the nouveau roman, says Gábor Csordás. The novel's four sets of interwoven narratives, spanning eastern and western Europe from the early 1960s to the fall of the Berlin Wall, are powered by the twin forces of politics and eroticism. But Parallel Stories is more than the sum of its plot lines: the real narrative is that of bodies' actions on one another, their attraction and desires, their mutual memories. This kind of "corporeal writing" is Nádas's great novelistic innovation.

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On the projected publication of the English version of Parallel Stories by Peter Nadas -- the grapevine has it down for Fall 2010, translation by Imre Goldstein.

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In 1989, the year the Berlin Wall came down, a university student on his morning run finds a corpse on a park bench and alerts the authorities. This classic police-procedural scene opens an extraordinary novel that traces the fate of myriad Europeans—Hungarians, Jews, Germans, Gypsies—across the treacherous years of the mid-twentieth century. The social and political circumstances of their lives may vary, their sexual and spiritual longings may seem unique to each of them, yet Péter Nádas’s magnificent tapestry weaves uncanny, reverberating parallels that link them across time and space.

Three men are at the heart of Parallel Stories: Hans von Wolkenstein, whose German mother is linked to dark secrets of Fascist-Nazi collaboration during the 1940s; Ágost Lippay Lehr, whose influential father has served Hungary’s political regimes for decades; and Andras Rott, who has his own record of dark activities abroad. They are friends in Budapest when we meet them in the spring of 1961, a pivotal time in the postwar epoch. Their richly detailed, dramatic experiences now center on Budapest, but the action of the novel carries us across Europe from the Alps to river ports on the Danube, from Greece to the North Sea. The daring episodes of Parallel Stories explore the most intimate, difficult human experiences in prose glowing with uncommon clarity and mysterious uncertainty.

This web of extended dramas reaches not just forward to the transformative year of 1989 but back to the spring of 1939, with Europe trembling on the edge of war; 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 to the cataclysmic Hungarian Revolution of October 1956. Parallel Stories is a daring, demanding, and moving exploration of humanity at its most constrained and its most free.

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Párhuzamos történetek (2005, Parallel Stories), a trilogy on which Nádas worked for 18 years, revolves around the histories of two families, one Hungarian, one German. The novel was a bestseller but received mixed reviews by critics, who were puzzled by its lack of organizing perspective and chaotic structure. Abandoning causal narrative, Nádas creates between his characters an irregular web of acausal internal connections and analogies through such keywords as murder, poverty, Jewishness, racism, masturbation, etc. "The question is not what connects people who know each other, but rather, what is the nature of the connections between those people who don't?" Nádas has argued.

sub-pet

May 12 2011, 12:52 PM

Just How Big Is Peter Nadas' Parallel Stories?

alliknowis

Sep 5 2010, 10:17 AM

Book of Memories is one of the greatest novels i've ever read.

DB Cooper

May 17 2011, 12:10 AM

It comes out in October, the same day as 1Q84 actually, so on that day I will acquire 2000 pages of awesome reading.

DB Cooper

May 17 2011, 12:10 AM

alliknowis

Sep 5 2010, 10:17 AM

Book of Memories is one of the greatest novels i've ever read.

High praise. Im unfamiliar with Nadas. After doing a little research it appears Book of Memories is well thought of, though many state that it is tedious and not exactly an edge of your seat page turner. Which is fine, but I need a little narrative propulsion. Now Parallel Stories looks to be more my cup of tea. It comes out in October, the same day as 1Q84 actually, so on that day I will acquire 2000 pages of awesome reading.

alliknowis

Aug 25 2011, 02:48 PM

Intelligent but brief review of Parallel Stories (the reviewer is Joshua Cohen in case that lures any of his fans, among whom I do not count myself)
http://nymag.com/print/?/guides/fallpreview/2011/books/peter-nadas/