THE GREAT HUNGARIAN NOVEL

STAGGERING IN ITS COMPLEXITY, `A BOOK OF MEMORIES' EXTENDS THE GRAND TRADITION OF EUROPEAN MODERNISM

Author: By Richard Dyer, Globe Staff

Date: SUNDAY, September 7, 1997

Page: N31

Section: Books

``That simple,'' the man reflects, ``yes, everything was that simple.''

The hundreds of densely worked pages that have preceded this conclusion trace the man's emotional journey to his point of arrival, or departure. ``A Book of Memories'' is a vast, astonishing, reverberant novel of staggering complexity, containing within itself every opposite. It is still, yet it can move with hurtling speed; it can be furiously literary and at other times speak with startling directness; it is detached and engaged, candid and reticent, violent and calm, lyrical and clinical, tragic and healing. It is a comprehensive and all-comprehending book about politics, sex, art, history, psychology, morality, and memory.

Peter Nadas, a Hungarian novelist born in 1942, wrote this book over a period of many years, and finally succeeded in getting it past the censors in 1986, five years after he had completed it. ``A Book of Memories'' was immediately acclaimed as a masterpiece of his national literature and a continuation of the great modern European tradition (Proust, Mann, Musil); the chorus of praise continued when the book was translated into German, in 1991. Now it appears in a clear English translation, by Ivan Sanders with Imre Goldstein, that can probably only hint at the stylistic distinction (and distinctions) of the original. In a brief author's note, Nadas says he has written a novel, not his own memoirs: ``the recollections of several people, separated by time, somewhat in the manner of Plutarch's `Parallel Lives.' '' And indeed there are four principal parallel narrative strands.

One is the narrator's recollections of childhood and adolescence in Budapest at the end of the Stalinist era, closing with a vivid account of the 1956 uprising in the streets and the subsequent suicide of the narrator's father, a state prosecutor.

Suffused with the unpredictability of tyranny, domestic and governmental; family secrets; and diffuse but intense youthful sexuality, this strand is probably the richest in incident, and therefore the most accessible part of the book. The narrator's grandparents don't speak to each other; his sister is autistic; his mother is dying. A mysterious man his father had betrayed, and whom his mother loves, returns from prison. Is he, perhaps, the narrator's real father? The tension of the reunion is extraordinary; the family politely sits down to dinner with its guest.

Even as a child, the narrator ponders the alluring possibility of denouncing his friends, even his father. The narrator bonds with his male friends, sometimes with violence. He also eagerly but uneasily pursues the erotic fascinations of girls -- sex is a charged subject because of what he knows about his parents, what he has seen, what his friends have seen. His own sexual urges are imperative, but unclear, anomalous. A masterly extended passage describes the difficult, filthy yet exalting birth of piglets; the mature narrator himself is being born in just such a way.

Another strand picks up the narrator in the early 1970s, when he is living in East Berlin and moving in bohemian/artistic circles. He is half in love with an actress named Thea Sandstuhl, and falls wholly in love with one of Thea's lovers, a poet named Melchior Thoenissen, who wants to escape to the West. In extended passages of great candor, sophistication, and sensuous wonder, the narrator explores every physical and psychological nuance of their relationship. Gradually, too, he learns how Melchior's history has paralleled his own. ``He considered himself very lucky to have been born in a place where a state of emergency had been in effect for fifty years -- this was worth pondering -- where for half a century not one honest word had been uttered in public, not one. . . . At least one did not have to bother with unnecessary illusions. . . . It was outrageously up front always to say the opposite of what one might be thinking, to do the opposite of what one would like to do, to build on the simple premise that the urge to lie, to cover up, to be secretive and sly, was at least as strong as the urge to be sincere, open, and aboveboard.''

Still another strand is represented by six substantial chapters from a novel the narrator is writing about a turn-of-the-century German novelist -- named Thoenissen -- who comes to revisit a spa on the North Sea where he had spent his childhood vacations. It is the same spa where the narrator himself has had an accident and undergone a sea change. The novel-within-a-novel, ripely overwritten, is a kind of transposition of the narrator's own experiences into another key, an attempt to order emotions through self-conscious art. Like the narrator, ``Thoenissen'' wishes ``to chart as precisely as possible the map of my life's emotional events.''

The fourth principal strand appears after the narrator's death. A childhood friend, who figures prominently in the first strand, now owns the manuscripts of the narrator's memoirs and of his novel. To them he contributes his own deliberately unimaginative but guileful perspective (``I am a rational man, perhaps too rational''); he has learned the sacrifices he must make to keep his footing in a treacherous world. Totalitarian society, this voice observes, ``had revealed its weakest side to me. Namely, that for all its professed ideals, it can make soup only from the vegetables that grow in its own garden.''

Woven into these strands are still other narratives. They come from myth, from art, from opera, from history, from a postcard, and from several characters who offer piecemeal recollections of their own pasts.

All these narratives are developed in meticulous and sometimes exhausting and even exasperating detail -- the only quality Nadas lacks is lightness of touch. Like Robert Musil, he is capable of devoting sentences and complicated paragraphs to the topic of who is going to sit next to whom in a box at the opera at a performance of ``Fidelio,'' a work whose sexual ambiguities do not escape the narrator. He even supplies a history of the opera house and a study of its architecture, part of an examination of the architecture of East Berlin, which is also a representation of its history and its psychological landscape. Paragraphs can run on for pages.

The structure of the book recapitulates the non-chronological structure of memory, which means that nothing proves to be a digression. Widely separated episodes skitter and cluster like filings on a magnet. Melchior appears on the third page, where we learn what has ``happened'' to him, but we do not learn of his first meeting with the narrator for another 400 pages -- though a substantial number of those pages have been devoted to the faltering progress of their relationship.

These things can make ``A Book of Memories'' difficult to read, but it is a book whose observation, imagination, authority, and resonance compel surrender to its manner and its methods. ``A Book of Memories'' is about the simple and unquestionable authenticity of emotion in a world where little else is what it appears to be: ``There is no memory without the memory of emotion,'' what in another place the narrator calls ``the grandeur, beauty and peril of the senses.'' Nadas renders emotions with such immediacy, passion, and compassion that the memories in ``A Book of Memories'' become experiences of our own.