A Book of Memories - Softcover

Nadas, Peter

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140275673 ISBN 13: 9780140275674

Publisher: Penguin Books, 1998

Synopsis

A collection of three tales captures the struggles and triumphs of people living with the horrific memories of Europe's recent past and the artistic repression they faced. Reprint.

About this title

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.

About the Author:

Péter Nádas is the author of the novels A Book of Memories, The End of a Family Story, and Love.  He lives in Gombosszeg, in western Hungary.

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Books
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0140275673
• ISBN 13: 9780140275674
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 720