num_pages: 720
description: This extraordinary magnum opus seems at first to be a confessional autobiographical novel in the grand manner, claiming and extending the legacy of Proust and Mann. But it is more: Peter Nadas has given us a superb contemporary psychological novel that comes to terms with the ghosts, corpses, and repressed nightmares of Europe's recent past. "A Book of Memories" is made up of three first-person narratives: the first that of a young Hungarian writer and his fated love for a German poet; we also learn of the narrator's adolescence in Budapest, when he experiences the downfall of his once-upper-class but now pro-Communist family and of his beloved but repudiated father, a state prosecutor who commits suicide after the 1956 uprising. A second memoir, alternating with the first, is a novel the narrator is composing about a refined Belle Epoque aesthete, whose anti-bourgeois transgressions seem like emotionally overcharged versions of the narrator's own experiences. A third voice is that of a childhood friend who, after the narrator's return to his homeland, offers an apparently more objective account of their friendship. Together these brilliantly colored lives are integrated in a powerful work of tragic intensity.
language: English
title: A Book of Memories
titlecomplete: A Book of Memories
genres: Hungarian Literature, Classics, LGBT, Novels, Hungary, Historical Fiction, Literature, 20th Century, Literary Fiction, Fiction
ratings_count: 552
awards: awardedAt: 915177600000
name: Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger
category: Roman, awardedAt: 1514793600000
name: Angelus
category: Shortlist, awardedAt: 788947200000
name: Leipzig Book Award
category: European Understanding
publisher: Penguin Books