Parallel Stories

Nádas’s (A Book of Memories) immense chronicle of Europe before, during, and after WWII largely succeeds in summing up a wide swath of Europe’s pre- and post-Nazi experience. Reaching as far into the 20th century as the fall of the Berlin Wall, the book is girded by the interconnected lives of three Hungarians with strong links to both the Nazi era and the socialist period that followed the war. But these elements share space and importance as the canvas broadens enormously to include repressed homosexuals, a Nazi boarding school with a suicide epidemic, concentration camp prisoners, Hungarian aristocrats, and numerous others. The book is by turns absorbing and stifling, oddly pervaded at virtually every turn by Nádas’s obsession with bodily excretions, transgressive sex, and the many parts used in the completion of both exercises. Endowed with an encyclopedic fascination in the minutiae of sexual perversion, and destined to share a place with other monstrous curiosities, this book offers a powerful and necessary counterhistory of a Europe now being reconfigured. (Nov.)