Transnational Strategies and Jewish Writing: Péter Nádas’s Parallel Stories as a European Novel

The book cover of the 1998 Vintage edition of Péter Nádas’s A Book of Memories (Emlékiratok könyve, 1986) featured the following sentence by Susan Sontag: “The greatest novel written in our time, and one of the greatest books of the century.”1 Adhering to the stylistic conventions of one-liners that embellish dust jackets, Sontag’s statement is excessively positive, its hyperbolic mode apparently geared toward garnering a wider audience for this Hungarian author about whom in the English speaking world very few may have heard at that time. There is much reason to doubt that Sontag’s appraisal for A Book of Memories succeeded at popularizing the book among American readers. The novel’s substantial length of 720 pages in the English translation, paired with a style that is invested in digressive meanderings at the expense of a straightforward plot may have posed obstacles to a wider reception. Sontag’s statement, however, acquired quite some fame. Hardly any English language publication on Nádas does without mentioning her glowing words; and, quite apparently, this essay is no exception in that respect either. Sontag’s aesthetic judgment shall remain unexamined here. Suffice it to say that Nádas not only invites comparisons with other novelistic projects of similar scale but imposes, if we will, by virtue of its sheer monumentality a kind of thinking in superlatives. A Book of Memories performs grandiosity through its multiple threads that cut across different times and places and are woven together into a narrative stream that emulates the meanderings of remembrance, only to turn, at times, into a meditation on the nature of memory itself. While this essay will, at a later point, touch upon the ways in which Nádas deliberately belabors novelistic traditions that have a firm foothold in the European tradition and is thus very much interested in the kind of comparison that Sontag opens up here, the starting point shall lie elsewhere: namely, with the peculiar geographic and political implications of her statement. From our contemporary perspective Sontag’s evocation of “our time” may not appear as unusual. In the increasingly digital age, the assumption of a