A BOOK OF MEMORIES – Novel by Péter Nádas

He was born in 1942, inside an October day. Péter Nádas (Hungarian author, essayist, and playwright), he is known for his detailed surrealist tales and prose-poems that often blended points of view or points in time. Personal responsibility, which means confronting the consequences of one’s own compromised morality, is a recurrent theme in his writing about history and his literature. Nádas began writing plays in the late 1970s, and from 1980 to 1981 he served as a dramaturge at a theatre. His mother died when he was a child, and his father committed suicide outside the family home in 1958. Thereafter he was raised by his grandparents. He left high school before graduating and turned to studying photography and taking photographs for a magazine, in the early 1960s. He continued to publish essays and short stories throughout the 1990s and into the 21st century. As you can discover, he is a writer who always sees history in the present tense.

This novel it is a multi-layered narrative that tells three parallel stories of love and betrayal. The first takes place in East Berlin in the 1970s (and features an unnamed Hungarian writer ensnared in a love triangle with a young German and a famous aging actress). The second, composed by the writeris the story of a late nineteenth century German aesthete whose experiences mirror his own). And the third voice is that of a friend from the writer’s childhood (who brings his own unexpected bearing to the story). First published in Hungary in 1986, Péter Nádas’s “A Book of Memories” is a modern classic. https://www.amazon.com/Book-Memories-Novel-P%C3%A9ter-N%C3%A1das/dp/0312427964