If there’s one book
which stands out on the longlist of the 2012 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize,
it’s Péter Nádas’ epic novel Parallel Stories (translated by Imre
Goldstein). A monster of a book,
eighteen years in the writing (and four in the translating), it runs to 1133
pages, and the hardback copy I obtained from my local library weighs a
ton. It’s a book with themes heavy
enough to match its bulk, a story of a country and its inability to face its
recent past. The question is though,
(ignoring its size) is it any good?
*****
What’s it all about?
Parallel Stories is a book which is extraordinarily difficult to pin
down. There are two major strands,
revolving around events in the small German town of Pfeilen and various places
in Hungary, particularly Budapest. The
main characters come from two families – the German Döhrings and the Hungarian
Lippay Lehrs. Within each half of the
story though, there are several
different timelines and viewpoints, meaning the reader has to pay a lot of
attention and remember a vast array of names, many of them extremely
unfamiliar.
The novel start with a
suspicious death in Berlin, but we are soon torn away to Budapest in 1961. Right from the beginning, we never stop
jumping from time to time, place to place, part-way through chapters, even
mid-sentence. At times it is difficult
to make out (or even believe in) a coherent plot of any kind. The reader experiences vague connections,
echoes, parallels between events, and while it is tempting to draw conclusions
from the information we’re presented with, it’s hard to imagine that we are
really meant to be any the wiser by the end of the book about any underlying
grand plan.
We’re not even really
sure who the central characters are supposed to be. The dust cover of my version focuses on André, Hans and Ágost,
three Hungarians who, having lived abroad, felt like exiles in their native
Budapest. Having read the book though,
I’m not all that convinced by what seems a very convenient (and arbitrary choice). For me, the key characters are Döhring, the
young German student whose discovery of a body begins the book, and Kristóf,
the youngest member of the Hungarian family and the one whose path we most
often cross.
One reason why these two
characters stand out, apart from the relatively-extended appearance time they
have, are the obvious parallels between them.
Both are psychology students, introverted and struggling to make sense
of the world, despite (or perhaps because of) their insights into the human psyche. Both have confused sexuality, yearning for
the unavailable or forbidden. Both
spend time on bland, yet tension-ridden, conversations with a person they’re
intrigued with. There’s a lot they have
in common…
And the parallels don’t
stop there – in fact, as you may have guessed, the novel is packed with
them. The word is ubiquitous, to the
point of being overused. Nádas
carefully constructs parallels between anything he can think of, from the two
countries and families, to the actions his characters take. Lesbian mothers, children snatched and later
returned, names adopted and discarded – wherever there’s an action, there seems
to be an equal and similar action somewhere else among the many, many pages Parallel
Stories has to offer the reader…
Of course, the problem is keeping all that straight
without having to take copious notes (something I started doing half-way
through the book…). As well as being
incredibly long, the book doesn’t exactly make it easy for the reader to keep
up with events. Characters pop up
briefly, disappear for what seems like enough time for glaciers to cover Europe
again, then reappear in another place entirely. As a child. You think I’m
joking? The detective Kienast, whom the
unsuspecting reader would have taken as a major character at the start of the
novel, promptly vanishes, not to be seen until close to the end of the
book. However, another Kienast, a child
who may or may not be the same person, does get a mention a little earlier –
about 600 pages in…
Regardless of whether
there is any real overarching structure to the book, there are several themes
that crop up repeatedly. The one that
probably gets the most attention, and may put many people off the book, is the
prominent position sex has in Parallel Stories. I don’t think I’ve read a work of literature
which has such lengthy, detailed descriptions of sexual acts, smells, positions
and fantasies, passages which test the stamina of the reader just as much as
that of the participants. For the most
part, Nádas is a tease, spreading anticipation and memories of sex over several
pages, preferring anticipation to the actual consummation (and when you think
again of the size of the book, that may come as no surprise!).
At times though, the sex
is graphic, leaving nothing – absolutely nothing – to the imagination. I’ve read that this idea of hedonism was a
reaction to the lack of freedom Hungarians had, a way of reclaiming their
identity and independence, and it’s an idea which does make sense. There’s a pervading sense of sexual
liberation and freedom of choice in sexual identity, one particularly evident
in Kristóf, what with his pursuit of the entrancing Klára and his nocturnal adventures in
Budapest’s gay underworld. The
forty-page session enjoyed by Ágost and his girlfriend, Gyöngyvér, is surely pushing this idea
to the limit though…
Another interesting idea
is the focus on mental illness and schizophrenia. This takes us back to Döhring and Kristóf, both of whom appear to
have some sort of issue, unable to cope with the parallel desires they
experience. This may also be a metaphor
for the whole book, as Budapest itself is a schizophrenic city, and not just in the divided, geographical sense. Nádas
repeatedly mentions the split between the normal folk on the street and the
Hungarian aristocracy, and the Lippay Lehrs, with both noble origins and
communist leanings, are particularly torn between these two opposing poles. The country as a whole, however, could also be
seen as schizophrenic, needing to pretend that everything is alright, ignoring
the political realities and the ever-present brutality in order to stay sane…
In
the end though, it’s probably pointless to dig too deeply into all of this
madness. If it took Nádas as much time
to write Parallel Stories as it takes to raise a child, there’s little
chance that I’m going to unlock its secrets in one insignificant review. It’s a book which takes a lot of reading,
but it does reward the reader, even if the first half is rather slow going. A more thorough knowledge of Hungary and its
recent history would probably make things a little clearer, but one thing is for sure –
this is not a book for the faint-hearted!
*****
Oh dear! Nádas' love of elaboration is obviously catching - I'm only half-way there... Join me tomorrow for the second half of my Parallel Stories review, in which I discuss its linguistic qualities and whether it was good enough for the shortlist :)
