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Shimmering Details, Volume I: A Memoir
The magnum opus of one of Europe's greatest living writers.
“Instead of a chronicle, a person tends to manufacture legends when he relates the story of his life for others,” Péter Nádas writes in his fiction masterpiece, Parallel Stories . Now, in his illuminating memoir, Shimmering Details , the renowned author investigates what it means to reconstruct a life without recourse to the techniques and embellishments of traditional storytelling.
Taking his firmly imbedded memories―the “shimmering details” that give this work its title―as his starting point, Nádas dissects them using a method inspired by Freudian dream interpretation. Sounds, scenes, smells, feelings―all are probed for details that might allow him to reconstruct what happened, and when and where. In order to avoid conscious or unconscious distortions, he deconstructs the stories of others, too―moving in concentric circles toward cause and effect, until their meaning and significance come to light.
In Shimmering Details, Volume I , Nádas probes the history of his family from the late 19th century to his birth in 1942 and beyond. In a work that encompasses World War II and the Hungarian Revolution, Nádas traces the hidden connections between the seemingly random events of a life and assembles them into a memoir like no other.
“Instead of a chronicle, a person tends to manufacture legends when he relates the story of his life for others,” Péter Nádas writes in his fiction masterpiece, Parallel Stories . Now, in his illuminating memoir, Shimmering Details , the renowned author investigates what it means to reconstruct a life without recourse to the techniques and embellishments of traditional storytelling.
Taking his firmly imbedded memories―the “shimmering details” that give this work its title―as his starting point, Nádas dissects them using a method inspired by Freudian dream interpretation. Sounds, scenes, smells, feelings―all are probed for details that might allow him to reconstruct what happened, and when and where. In order to avoid conscious or unconscious distortions, he deconstructs the stories of others, too―moving in concentric circles toward cause and effect, until their meaning and significance come to light.
In Shimmering Details, Volume I , Nádas probes the history of his family from the late 19th century to his birth in 1942 and beyond. In a work that encompasses World War II and the Hungarian Revolution, Nádas traces the hidden connections between the seemingly random events of a life and assembles them into a memoir like no other.
576 pages, Hardcover
Published November 21, 2023
13 people are currently reading
282 people want to read
About the author
Péter Nádas
106 books233 followersHungarian novelist, essayist, and dramatist, a major central European literary figure. Nádas made his international breakthrough with the monumental novel A Book of Memories (1986), a psychological novel following the tradition of Proust, Thomas Mann, and magic realism.
Péter Nádas was born in Budapest, as the son of a high-ranking party functionary. Nádas's grandfather, Moritz Grünfeld, changed his name into Hungarian, which was considered a scandal in the family. Nádas's youth was shadowed by the loss of his parents. Nádas's mother died of cancer when he was young and his father committed suicide. At the age of 16 his uncle gave him a camera, and after dropping out of school Nádas turned to photojournalism. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, he worked as an editor, reader, and drama consultant. After the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, Nádas quit his job as a journalist and devoted himself to literature. "I resigned, walked out, and turned my back on the system to save my soul," he later said.
Péter Nádas was born in Budapest, as the son of a high-ranking party functionary. Nádas's grandfather, Moritz Grünfeld, changed his name into Hungarian, which was considered a scandal in the family. Nádas's youth was shadowed by the loss of his parents. Nádas's mother died of cancer when he was young and his father committed suicide. At the age of 16 his uncle gave him a camera, and after dropping out of school Nádas turned to photojournalism. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, he worked as an editor, reader, and drama consultant. After the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, Nádas quit his job as a journalist and devoted himself to literature. "I resigned, walked out, and turned my back on the system to save my soul," he later said.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
February 8, 2024
It took me more than a month to navigate through the intricacies of Péter Nádas's memoir, and mind you, this is only the first volume! Upon completing it, I felt as though I had gained a deeper understanding of Hungary – what sets it apart from its Germanic and Slavic neighbours, as well as the commonalities they share. Nádas skilfully highlights the complex history of Hungary, emphasising its multicultural past and the evolution of the concept of nationhood, which he weaves throughout his family's stories. He underscores the fact that in the early 19th century, only 42 per cent of the eight million inhabitants of the Kingdom of Hungary spoke Hungarian, illustrating the country's diverse population and the co-existence of various cultures, religions, and customs.
As Nádas comes from a Jewish family, there is a huge portion of the stories he dedicates to the life of his Jewish ancestors in Hungary. One such interesting instance is the Tiszaeszlár affair in Nyíregyháza, originally a murder case which was later presented by the media of that time as a Jewish blood libel, leading to a set of trials that set off anti-Semitic agitation in Austria-Hungary between 1882 and 1883. Triggering this case was the death of a local girl, Eszter Solymosi, following which Jews were accused of murdering and beheading her. A body was found in the Tisza river where she lived, having apparently drowned, which later drew controversy as the body wasn’t that of Eszter, yet dressed in her clothes. A lengthy trial followed, resulting in the acquittal of all of the accused. Yet the case triggered anti-Semitic agitation in the years that followed.
Nádas describes the case in minute detail, not only the chronology and the legal processes but also the role that his family played in the case. The brother of his great-grandfather, Ernő Mezei, sent an interpellation addressed to the minister of justice in November 1882, which led to some dramatic scenes. Attorney-general Havas was then sent to Nyíregyháza, and he found that, despite the official declaration of the examining judge, the accused had not been granted a single hearing. Some of the prisoners were released by him. But, realising he was hampered by powerful influences in his endeavour to accelerate the affair, he offered his resignation, which was readily accepted.
Despite the wealth of detail, I found myself struggling with the memoir's non-chronological structure. Without distinct chapters, readers must rely solely on Nádas's narrative to track the story's progression. The memoir also shifts anachronistically between different time periods, which can be disorienting. However, this unconventional structure may also reflect Nádas's assertion that the past, present, and future coexist in a continuous present. While it presents challenges, it also offers a unique storytelling experience, akin to a roller coaster ride through history, where anything can happen at any moment.
As Nádas comes from a Jewish family, there is a huge portion of the stories he dedicates to the life of his Jewish ancestors in Hungary. One such interesting instance is the Tiszaeszlár affair in Nyíregyháza, originally a murder case which was later presented by the media of that time as a Jewish blood libel, leading to a set of trials that set off anti-Semitic agitation in Austria-Hungary between 1882 and 1883. Triggering this case was the death of a local girl, Eszter Solymosi, following which Jews were accused of murdering and beheading her. A body was found in the Tisza river where she lived, having apparently drowned, which later drew controversy as the body wasn’t that of Eszter, yet dressed in her clothes. A lengthy trial followed, resulting in the acquittal of all of the accused. Yet the case triggered anti-Semitic agitation in the years that followed.
Nádas describes the case in minute detail, not only the chronology and the legal processes but also the role that his family played in the case. The brother of his great-grandfather, Ernő Mezei, sent an interpellation addressed to the minister of justice in November 1882, which led to some dramatic scenes. Attorney-general Havas was then sent to Nyíregyháza, and he found that, despite the official declaration of the examining judge, the accused had not been granted a single hearing. Some of the prisoners were released by him. But, realising he was hampered by powerful influences in his endeavour to accelerate the affair, he offered his resignation, which was readily accepted.
Despite the wealth of detail, I found myself struggling with the memoir's non-chronological structure. Without distinct chapters, readers must rely solely on Nádas's narrative to track the story's progression. The memoir also shifts anachronistically between different time periods, which can be disorienting. However, this unconventional structure may also reflect Nádas's assertion that the past, present, and future coexist in a continuous present. While it presents challenges, it also offers a unique storytelling experience, akin to a roller coaster ride through history, where anything can happen at any moment.
May 23, 2023
I know more about Hungary now.
December 12, 2023
Hungarian Péter Nádas—novelist, photographer, and journalist—has managed to live through interesting times. Born in the midst of WWII, his hometown, Budapest, was bombed by both German and Russian armies; he witnessed Stalinist purges on the fringes of the Soviet Union, involving infighting (and fatal betrayals) among Hungary’s Communist Party members; government collapse, violent revolution, and restored oppression; harassment by undercover agents for suspect behavior; and more. Born into an affluent Jewish family whose immediate and extended members were involved in national conservative-liberal Hungarian politics going back four or five generations, almost all of whom were writers—historians, poets, novelists, and translators. It’s no wonder the family library was such a treasure for the young Nádas.
Nádas nevertheless began attending Calvinist services as a child, under the wing of one of the family’s maids, and to the chagrin of his godless communist parents. (Attending Calvinist services was no childhood whim—Nádas states that in late middle age he took up studying Calvinist doctrine in earnest and formally confessed his faith as a Christian.)
Beginning with his memories as a toddler during the Second World War—during the bombing of the apartment his parents lived in— Shimmering Details includes summaries of interviews with family members decades after the events and the reading of both contemporary official accounts and memoirs written years after the events, in an attempt to attain the truth regarding various wartime and later political efforts that included his parents and relatives. Here is an autobiography by an author whose conscientiousness and ethical values require him to question the trustworthiness of his memory, to see if he can square his memories with other accounts of the same events.
The bombing of his apartment building at the beginning of Volume 1 finds him—aged two—in the arms of his mother as a brick wall falls upon them. Later events, when Nádas is aged three or four, include his father’s conscription by Germany as a prisoner of war, used for his engineering skills and as a spy (along with several of Nádas’s relatives) for the illegal Hungarian communist party. (After the war, the willingness of these party members to lie—even about other family members—in order to protect themselves and betray others (including family members)—is a side-effect that Nádas notes is all too common among authoritarian ideologists.) Despite, or because of, the emotional turmoil one might imagine the war and its lingering aftermath might inflict on any sensate person, Nádas sees himself in retrospect as autistic, someone for whom a wide range of emotional reactions made no sense—perhaps in part because of the monstrous hypocrisies he saw adults engage in all his life, and in part to the rational, even-toned explanations they provided young Péter with, from his father’s descriptions of the principles of physics to his mother’s adjective-free description of the six months of torture young Péter’s father experienced as a prisoner of war:
"As if my mother had meant to prepare me for something quite matter-of-factly, something that a person can hardly avoid in life, interrogation under torture. This intermittent half a year included electric shock to the genitals, electric shock in water, which I remembered very well, because I didn’t understand it, but my father explained in detail how and why certain materials such as the mucous membranes amplify electricity and how the body can be made to conduct it, how the positive and negative poles of electrical energy function; it was Sunday when he explained it; and also beating the shoulders and the head with truncheons, and then the so-called talpalás, the beating of the soles of the feet, the knocking out of the teeth, being spread-eagled, being hung up, the repeated and deliberate ripping open of scabby wounds, standing you up against the wall, and so on. So that I’d understand electric circuits, he even had electric current strike me. Let it be said in his defense that back in those days they hadn’t amplified the voltage to 220 volts yet, though the 110 volts gave me quite a shock, too. In the autobiographical sketches he wrote for the benefit of his comrades, perhaps he held off revealing the temporal lengths and means of his interrogations under torture because by relating the story of his physical trauma, he’d have called attention to the helplessness of his situation."
Readers encountering a two-volume work clocking in at about 1,100 pages, written during the author’s 74th year and labeling itself a memoir, well, such readers might expect such superficialities as photographs and chapters organized according to key events. But not only are there no photographs and no chapters, this memoir doesn’t even have breaks between (typically two-and-a-half page-long) paragraphs to indicate a change in time or scene. (Although there are two paragraphs ending with suggestive ellipses. Judith Sollosy, who translated both volumes, had a real workout presented to her, which she deftly mastered.) Nor is it chronological or comprehensive, covering only the roughly dozen years between the author’s ages from two to 14—from the time his parents’ apartment was bombed during WWII until their deaths (his mother from cancer, his father from suicide) before the October revolution of 1956, which failed in its one coherent aim—independence from the Soviet Union. Nádas’s approach to the story of his life follows a series of concentric circles leading, over the years before and after his birth, up to and away from personal, national, and world-historical events.
Hundreds of pages throughout the two volumes are dedicated to his forbears and friends of his family. Volume 2 begins with his search, as an adult, for a concentration camp in France along its border with Spain at the Pyrenees, a camp almost entirely forgotten because its internees comprised communists and anarchists who fought against fascist forces in Spain. Nádas’s father would have been among their number if not for a medical condition, but Péter Nádas did have an uncle who spent some time at the camp before escaping, and many of his father’s friends died there. Those who managed to escape were not seen as heroes, however. During WWII, Hungary’s Communist Party (which Nádas’s parents faithfully served) was illegal, and members risked their lives fighting Nazis there. But Party members who survived arrest and interrogation at the hands of the Nazis were often later tortured and killed by the same Party they served under the rationale that the only reason the Nazis hadn’t killed them was because they had ratted out other Party members. And for that alleged betrayal, the Party would finish what the Nazis began.
Stalin’s paranoid purges in Russia found their counterpart in Hungary, where Communist Party members could not betray each other fast enough, especially if they felt it would save their own lives. Hypocrisy and duplicity reigned in Hungary’s government for decades after the war. Nádas at an early age became quite sensitive to the abuses to which logic and language were put in the name of the Party, whose existence took precedence over mere human life:
"The series of renunciations made it quite clear what constitutes the set of conditions required by opportunism and collaboration, what the sentimental use of language is a substitute for, and what it is meant to hide behind this spellbinding sleight of hand. To hide and reorchestrate, through the manipulation of language, offenses against others in the interest of preserving one’s desirable self-image.
"Lacking political representation, those who at that moment were Jews or who, despite their intentions, suddenly counted as Jews, found themselves up against an armed and bureaucratic apparatus that would not tolerate or acknowledge representation of any kind. A nation, too, is also invariably the fiction of others."
Driven and repulsed by what he witnessed, Nádas’s hatred of all forms of tyranny has given his Calvinist theology an interesting shape:
"The God we have will effectuate every act of every individual without the least scruple, and in this he is an almighty God indeed.
"A person who serves this God must make sure of just one thing, that he should have no self-imposed ethical or psychological obstacles stand in his way, that the Irish Protestants should not be prevented from slaughtering Irish Catholics with reference to Jesus Christ, who themselves are slaughtering the Irish Protestants with reference to Jesus Christ, that there should be no obstacle to prevent the Croatians’ own god from slaughtering the Servs in the name of Jesus Christ. And lest we forget, according to Canon Law, the pope prays for the salvation of the murderers and not their victims, whereby he encourages the freedom of action of survivors. The silent clamor of the dead has not yet reached his most holy ear; what’s more, he must turn off his hearing with his consciousness, which he calls faith."
Shimmering Details is a vital record of historical facts and human cruelty demonstrating the falsity behind the notion that individuals are separable from the cultural ideologies they are born into.
For more of my reviews, please see https://www.thebookbeat.com/backroom/...
Nádas nevertheless began attending Calvinist services as a child, under the wing of one of the family’s maids, and to the chagrin of his godless communist parents. (Attending Calvinist services was no childhood whim—Nádas states that in late middle age he took up studying Calvinist doctrine in earnest and formally confessed his faith as a Christian.)
Beginning with his memories as a toddler during the Second World War—during the bombing of the apartment his parents lived in— Shimmering Details includes summaries of interviews with family members decades after the events and the reading of both contemporary official accounts and memoirs written years after the events, in an attempt to attain the truth regarding various wartime and later political efforts that included his parents and relatives. Here is an autobiography by an author whose conscientiousness and ethical values require him to question the trustworthiness of his memory, to see if he can square his memories with other accounts of the same events.
The bombing of his apartment building at the beginning of Volume 1 finds him—aged two—in the arms of his mother as a brick wall falls upon them. Later events, when Nádas is aged three or four, include his father’s conscription by Germany as a prisoner of war, used for his engineering skills and as a spy (along with several of Nádas’s relatives) for the illegal Hungarian communist party. (After the war, the willingness of these party members to lie—even about other family members—in order to protect themselves and betray others (including family members)—is a side-effect that Nádas notes is all too common among authoritarian ideologists.) Despite, or because of, the emotional turmoil one might imagine the war and its lingering aftermath might inflict on any sensate person, Nádas sees himself in retrospect as autistic, someone for whom a wide range of emotional reactions made no sense—perhaps in part because of the monstrous hypocrisies he saw adults engage in all his life, and in part to the rational, even-toned explanations they provided young Péter with, from his father’s descriptions of the principles of physics to his mother’s adjective-free description of the six months of torture young Péter’s father experienced as a prisoner of war:
"As if my mother had meant to prepare me for something quite matter-of-factly, something that a person can hardly avoid in life, interrogation under torture. This intermittent half a year included electric shock to the genitals, electric shock in water, which I remembered very well, because I didn’t understand it, but my father explained in detail how and why certain materials such as the mucous membranes amplify electricity and how the body can be made to conduct it, how the positive and negative poles of electrical energy function; it was Sunday when he explained it; and also beating the shoulders and the head with truncheons, and then the so-called talpalás, the beating of the soles of the feet, the knocking out of the teeth, being spread-eagled, being hung up, the repeated and deliberate ripping open of scabby wounds, standing you up against the wall, and so on. So that I’d understand electric circuits, he even had electric current strike me. Let it be said in his defense that back in those days they hadn’t amplified the voltage to 220 volts yet, though the 110 volts gave me quite a shock, too. In the autobiographical sketches he wrote for the benefit of his comrades, perhaps he held off revealing the temporal lengths and means of his interrogations under torture because by relating the story of his physical trauma, he’d have called attention to the helplessness of his situation."
Readers encountering a two-volume work clocking in at about 1,100 pages, written during the author’s 74th year and labeling itself a memoir, well, such readers might expect such superficialities as photographs and chapters organized according to key events. But not only are there no photographs and no chapters, this memoir doesn’t even have breaks between (typically two-and-a-half page-long) paragraphs to indicate a change in time or scene. (Although there are two paragraphs ending with suggestive ellipses. Judith Sollosy, who translated both volumes, had a real workout presented to her, which she deftly mastered.) Nor is it chronological or comprehensive, covering only the roughly dozen years between the author’s ages from two to 14—from the time his parents’ apartment was bombed during WWII until their deaths (his mother from cancer, his father from suicide) before the October revolution of 1956, which failed in its one coherent aim—independence from the Soviet Union. Nádas’s approach to the story of his life follows a series of concentric circles leading, over the years before and after his birth, up to and away from personal, national, and world-historical events.
Hundreds of pages throughout the two volumes are dedicated to his forbears and friends of his family. Volume 2 begins with his search, as an adult, for a concentration camp in France along its border with Spain at the Pyrenees, a camp almost entirely forgotten because its internees comprised communists and anarchists who fought against fascist forces in Spain. Nádas’s father would have been among their number if not for a medical condition, but Péter Nádas did have an uncle who spent some time at the camp before escaping, and many of his father’s friends died there. Those who managed to escape were not seen as heroes, however. During WWII, Hungary’s Communist Party (which Nádas’s parents faithfully served) was illegal, and members risked their lives fighting Nazis there. But Party members who survived arrest and interrogation at the hands of the Nazis were often later tortured and killed by the same Party they served under the rationale that the only reason the Nazis hadn’t killed them was because they had ratted out other Party members. And for that alleged betrayal, the Party would finish what the Nazis began.
Stalin’s paranoid purges in Russia found their counterpart in Hungary, where Communist Party members could not betray each other fast enough, especially if they felt it would save their own lives. Hypocrisy and duplicity reigned in Hungary’s government for decades after the war. Nádas at an early age became quite sensitive to the abuses to which logic and language were put in the name of the Party, whose existence took precedence over mere human life:
"The series of renunciations made it quite clear what constitutes the set of conditions required by opportunism and collaboration, what the sentimental use of language is a substitute for, and what it is meant to hide behind this spellbinding sleight of hand. To hide and reorchestrate, through the manipulation of language, offenses against others in the interest of preserving one’s desirable self-image.
"Lacking political representation, those who at that moment were Jews or who, despite their intentions, suddenly counted as Jews, found themselves up against an armed and bureaucratic apparatus that would not tolerate or acknowledge representation of any kind. A nation, too, is also invariably the fiction of others."
Driven and repulsed by what he witnessed, Nádas’s hatred of all forms of tyranny has given his Calvinist theology an interesting shape:
"The God we have will effectuate every act of every individual without the least scruple, and in this he is an almighty God indeed.
"A person who serves this God must make sure of just one thing, that he should have no self-imposed ethical or psychological obstacles stand in his way, that the Irish Protestants should not be prevented from slaughtering Irish Catholics with reference to Jesus Christ, who themselves are slaughtering the Irish Protestants with reference to Jesus Christ, that there should be no obstacle to prevent the Croatians’ own god from slaughtering the Servs in the name of Jesus Christ. And lest we forget, according to Canon Law, the pope prays for the salvation of the murderers and not their victims, whereby he encourages the freedom of action of survivors. The silent clamor of the dead has not yet reached his most holy ear; what’s more, he must turn off his hearing with his consciousness, which he calls faith."
Shimmering Details is a vital record of historical facts and human cruelty demonstrating the falsity behind the notion that individuals are separable from the cultural ideologies they are born into.
For more of my reviews, please see https://www.thebookbeat.com/backroom/...
July 12, 2024
Bästa jag läst på länge! Helt otroligt språk och sätt att ta sig an och skildra brutala händelser. Nádas personliga ögonblicksbilder och minnen blir också en gripande berättelse om Ungern. Vill till Budapest än mer nu.
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September 18, 2024I used to proudly call myself Nadas's biggest fan in the English speaking world, and I think I still would but found it exceedingly difficult to get through this volume for some reason.
May 28, 2022
Min recension: https://www.dalademokraten.se/2022-05...
December 28, 2025
Péter Nádas första del av Illuminerade detaljer är en otroligt välskriven bok som jag njuter av att läsa, även om jag märker att jag inte riktigt hittar den där omedelbara längtan efter att ständigt återvända till sidorna. Boken är en djupdykning i ungersk historia kring författarens födelseår 1942 och är fylld av rika och historiska detaljer. Som läsare får man följa en judisk familj med borgerliga rötter och otroliga förgreningar i det gamla kejsardömet Österrike-Ungern, vilket är ett historiskt perspektiv som verkligen fängslar. Det finns något djupt drabbande i dessa judiska släktberättelser från Östeuropa; de väcker en sorg och nostalgi över den rika kultur som så brutalt slogs sönder och försvann i samband med Förintelsen (Jag älskade En berättelse om kärlek och mörker av Amos Oz)
Nádas skildrar skickligt hur stora mänskliga umbäranden varvas med en priviligierad tillvaro, och hans prosa är så jämn och säker att han aldrig tycks darra på manschetten. Trots att boken omfattar hela 570 sidor utan en enda kapitelindelning upplevde jag det märkligt nog inte som ett hinder. Tvärtom flyter texten i en jämn ström av anekdoter och intressanta stickspår, vilket gör det till en perfekt bok att ta upp och fortsätta läsa i även efter ett längre uppehåll. Den skapar sin egen rymd som man kan kliva in och ut ur.
Den enda nackdelen för min del var det enorma släktgalleriet. Trots bokens kvalitéer lyckades jag aldrig riktigt ta till mig alla namnen eller bli helt hemtam i familjeträdet, vilket skapade en viss distans och gjorde upplevelsen något sämre än den annars kunnat vara. Det är dock utan tvekan en riktigt bra och fascinerande bok. Nu återstår det att se när jag känner mig redo att ta mig an del två av detta monumentala verk?
Nádas skildrar skickligt hur stora mänskliga umbäranden varvas med en priviligierad tillvaro, och hans prosa är så jämn och säker att han aldrig tycks darra på manschetten. Trots att boken omfattar hela 570 sidor utan en enda kapitelindelning upplevde jag det märkligt nog inte som ett hinder. Tvärtom flyter texten i en jämn ström av anekdoter och intressanta stickspår, vilket gör det till en perfekt bok att ta upp och fortsätta läsa i även efter ett längre uppehåll. Den skapar sin egen rymd som man kan kliva in och ut ur.
Den enda nackdelen för min del var det enorma släktgalleriet. Trots bokens kvalitéer lyckades jag aldrig riktigt ta till mig alla namnen eller bli helt hemtam i familjeträdet, vilket skapade en viss distans och gjorde upplevelsen något sämre än den annars kunnat vara. Det är dock utan tvekan en riktigt bra och fascinerande bok. Nu återstår det att se när jag känner mig redo att ta mig an del två av detta monumentala verk?
July 8, 2025
I have a fair amount of reading stamina, but this 2-volume detailed and introspective memoir was just too much for me. It traces the author's life and family history over the 20th century in Hungary through his formative childhood experiences during WWII and the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. It is a very long and dense read and I found myself floundering at times. It demands a lot of concentration and application and I’m afraid I wasn’t up to the job. The non-linear and non-chronological narrative, with no narrative arcs, and often not even any paragraph breaks, failed to engage me. Interesting highlights were overshadowed by just so just so many words. I can see that this is an important historical document, I can see that it has much to offer, but for the non-specialist reader like myself it was just too much hard work and the personal story got lost along the way.
April 1, 2024
extremely boring.
i loved parallel stories by péter nádas.
his memoir proved insufferable to me.
i loved parallel stories by péter nádas.
his memoir proved insufferable to me.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews