The Review of Contemporary Fiction

A Book of Memories by Péter Nádas
Irving Malin

Péter Nádas. A Book of Memories. Trans. Ivan Sanders with Imre Goldstein. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1997. 706 pp. $30.00.

There are rare moments when a reviewer recognizes that a book he is discussing is a true work of art, an astonishing achievement. I once reviewed a strange novel entitled Pale Fire; although I did not know how to capture its formal, dazzling structure, I recognized it as a masterpiece. Although I’m not sure about A Book of Memories, I believe it is one of the great novels of the last fifty years. It reminds me, in part, of the amazing conjunctions of memory, sexuality, and creativity found in Proust and Mann.
I can merely hint here at the themes and metaphors of Nádas’s achievement. The title immediately brings into play two of the underlying themes of the narrative: memory and the creative description of memory. There are three sections of the text. One seems to be concerned with the “last days” of the narrator who, at age thirty-three, tries to understand the reasons for despair about his abilities to render the past—that past which has made him the odd, miserable artist he assumes he is. But even in this section we are made aware of his “anomolous nature.”
Although the narrator wants to write another text—and he gives us in the second section a broken, mythological “mural”—he is unable to finish it. He is so preoccupied with arbitrary movements, disjointed perceptions, that he offers one which reflects his obessions with creativity and bisexuality. He calls his text “the multisecret world of my presentiments and presumptions.” The “multisecret world” challenges his talent and his life.
To complicate matters, the third section seems to be another revision—a revision by another narrator. Thus we have a textual commentary upon the “original” text. And we are not really shocked because Nádas has been using duplicitous subversions throughout his novel. Such sentences as the following have prepared us for “multisecret worlds”: “There is no memory without the recurrence of emotions or conversely, every moment of lived experience is also an allusion to a former experience—that is what memory is.” [Irving Malin]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction A Book of Memories by Péter Nádas Irving Malin Péter Nádas. A Book of Memories. Trans. Ivan Sanders with Imre Goldstein. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1997. 706 pp. $30.00. There are rare moments when a reviewer recognizes that a book he is discussing is a true work of art, an astonishing achievement. I once reviewed a strange novel entitled Pale Fire; although I did not know how to capture its formal, dazzling structure, I recognized it as a masterpiece. Although I’m not sure about A Book of Memories, I believe it is one of the great novels of the last fifty years. It reminds me, in part, of the amazing conjunctions of memory, sexuality, and creativity found in Proust and Mann. I can merely hint here at the themes and metaphors of Nádas’s achievement. The title immediately brings into play two of the underlying themes of the narrative: memory and the creative description of memory. There are three sections of the text. One seems to be concerned with the “last days” of the narrator who, at age thirty-three, tries to understand the reasons for despair about his abilities to render the past—that past which has made him the odd, miserable artist he assumes he is. But even in this section we are made aware of his “anomolous nature.” Although the narrator wants to write another text—and he gives us in the second section a broken, mythological “mural”—he is unable to finish it. He is so preoccupied with arbitrary movements, disjointed perceptions, that he offers one which reflects his obessions with creativity and bisexuality. He calls his text “the multisecret world of my presentiments and presumptions.” The “multisecret world” challenges his talent and his life. To complicate matters, the third section seems to be another revision—a revision by another narrator. Thus we have a textual commentary upon the “original” text. And we are not really shocked because Nádas has been using duplicitous subversions throughout his novel. Such sentences as the following have prepared us for “multisecret worlds”: “There is no memory without the recurrence of emotions or conversely, every moment of lived experience is also an allusion to a former experience—that is what memory is.” [Irving Malin]

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