The End of a Family Story

As in his previous novel, The Book of Memories, Hungarian author Nadas intricately and beautifully relates concentric stories within stories. In this case, a boy struggles to comprehend the threatening forces wrought by the adults who are supposed to care for him, against the backdrop of Communist politics and, beyond, the larger realm of biblical history. Playing with the neighboring children, the unnamed first-person narrator enacts the ""family story"" as he knows it, involving himself and two of his friends: he plays Papa, Eva plays Mama and Gabor portrays the child in a makeshift domestic paradise. Nadas quickly shows the irregularities in the real-life model for this idyllic portrait: Papa comes home rarely, traveling at night, stinking of the ""barracks where they held those interrogations,"" his clothes washed hastily overnight in benzene by the boy's principal caretaker, Grandmama. Terrible accusatory arguments between Papa and Grandpapa ensue during these visits; Nadas undercuts the narrative with brusque descriptions of traumatic events that happen later, namely the successive deaths of the boy's grandparents, the exposure of his ""traitor"" father and the boy's eventual delivery to an institution. Simultaneously, and most lyrically, Grandpapa, obsessed by the sin of his son and the desire to adhere to the truth, recounts to the boy the plight of the biblical Jews, ""our ancestors,"" a story that was related by his own grandfather. Readers of The Book of Memories will find this slim volume knottier and less accessible than the previous work. Moreover, the reader is never apprised of what the father's actual crime is. For those who savor the language, however, unraveling Nadas's tightly skeined prose supplies its own rewards. (Nov.)