Shimmering Details, Volume I: A Memoir

Hungarian novelist and playwright Nádas (Parallel Stories) interrogates his early life and family lore against a vibrant backdrop of 20th-century Budapest in the extraordinary first installment of his two-part memoir. Nádas begins with his first visual memory: a sudden flash of light followed by the sensation of flying through the air and crashing into a wall with his mother. He then puzzles over his recollection of the event and compares it with contemporaneous reporting on the bombing of Budapest by Allied forces and his aunt’s account, which contradicts his own. Applying the same inquisitive approach to other anecdotes—most spanning from his birth in 1942 to the Hungarian Revolution in 1956—Nádas consistently teases out surprising, thought-provoking associations between events. While recounting searches for disappeared loved ones after WWII, for example, he parallels the fate of a military commander who orchestrated the “annihilation” of forced laborers with the witty repartee his parents engaged in at their dinner parties in the 1950s “in order to keep themselves on the surface of the centuries-old rubble heap where everything has to be built from scratch again and again.” Prodigious historical references and a sprawling cast make this a rigorous reading experience even for seasoned Nádas fans, but the rewards are undeniable. This challenging and exceptional memoir affirms the author as a master of his craft. (Nov.)