Jörg’s Reviews > Parallelgeschichten > Status Update

When is too much too much? Nothing would have been missed if the last two chapters (140 pages) weren't included. Which is valid for at least a third of the pages. But then, this is the concept of Parallel Stories. Life is a lot of them at the same time and only together a world comes into being.

Against better knowledge, I was hoping for a resolution for some of the open endings. Instead, the penultimate chapter of 100 pages introduces completely new characters, only related to a minor character.

Closure has been granted to only a few strands so far, usually by death. In one particularly perfidious case Nadas mentions that the secret only will be shared far in the future of the novel's scope.

Some more recurring topics: architecture, epilepsy.

And a few more connections show up, one of them after more than 1,400 pages. The inspector from Berlin is the son of someone growing up in the institute of racial biology with Hans von Wolkenstein. Klara, Kristof's romantic interest, is the daughter of Geheimrat Vay, the one responsible for the deportation of Jews in 1944.

Currently, two narrations are interchanging.
Germany before the war with a focus on Hans von Wolkenstein being committed to a national socialist experimental facility for bastard children to conduct racial studies on them.
Hungary 1961 with Kristof being the third wheel on the way to a party with the waitress Klara and her partner. The city is in a state of emergency.
The storyline of Kristof is dragging.

One of the big topics is jewish life and the holocaust. Some narrations stop suddenly, others appear almost out of nowhere with people being mentionedhundreds of pages earlier with only a few sentences.
The racial scientists von der Schuer and von Thun zu Wolkenstein work on the preparations for the annihilation of the Hungarian jews.

Many chapters are almost short stories in itself. They are moments in time in which the reader follows the thoughts and observations of characters from the main cast or characters only appearing in this chapter, almost unnoticeably linked to the rest. Through their thoughts, more relevant aspects of the time are introduced to the narration. Nádas crafts extraordinarily rich and unique characters.

Less than 1,000 to go. Captain Bellardi and the architect Madzar talk on the Danube luxury steamboat about lots of nullities. They were friends in school. The captain explains how each dish they eat is cooked. He never mentions the task he wants to give to Madzar. There is something dark with someone in their shared past which isn't mentioned either.
Parallelity of what is said and what is not said.

Gyöngyver walking along the floor after sex with Agost leads to her landlord Irma's eschewed affair with her architect before the war and revisits their promenade on Margaret Island.
Kristof's visit to the café to ask the waitress for a date triggers memories of fall 1956 when Russian tanks shot this house and forced Kristof and his family to hide in the cellar.
One situation, a lot of introspection and digressions.

On the Buda side of the Danube, four old ladies play their roles while playing cards. Only their inner thoughts reflect their real torments.
Meanwhile, opposite on Margaret Island - the local gay meetup at night, Kristof does the opposite. He fights his inner demons in the woods torn between succumbing to the gay hunting prey and ending his suffering by jumping from a Danube bridge.

Book 1 finished. Exhausting incomprehensible meandering alternates with sharp dissecting passages. Within a sentence, the narration leaves the one-backed animal of Gyöngyver and Agost to follow her landlord Irma to her round of cards with her three old friends. Before that, she surprised the both of them and, pretending to not noticing, talked with Gyöngyver about the most mundane subjects.