On Nadas's Parallel Stories

A few days ago we got to know the new Nobel Prize winner, Alice Munroe. In the near future I'll try to read some of her work and write on it, but until then a few more lines on Peter Nadas, and his giant book Parallel Stories. I will take a brief look at four criticisms of Nadas’s book, show why they are mistaken in the complaints and point to the main merits of the book.

A nice place to start criticizing is Jonathan Cape's review, which appeared in The Independent. Cape voices a negative criticism emphasizing that not all of the story lines merge. Voicing this complaint nowadays is anachronistic: most writers try to get you to know their characters by revealing them through the unfolding story and offering a peek into their emotional life. A point Cape might be right about is that for someone from a culture which didn't go through German and Soviet influence and occupation the tragedies of the characters, their experiences might be harder to relate to, as for people in post-soviet countries and Germany.

Toby Clements writes in a very similar tone for The Telegraph. Clements laments that the book is challenging. Well, if you want to read easy novels, you should have picked up something in the '3 for 2' section of Tesco. Clements' main problem is that he doesn't get much to know about anything and he does not see any conclusion. My main problem with Celements is, that much of the 20th century's good literature follows a pattern that does not cherish easy conclusions: it shows you scenes of the lives of its characters, which then enable you to understand them better, to see how they behaved in certain historically charged settings, how they reacted to things present in the lives of each of. The conclusions are there for you to draw. Too much work?

Benjamin Moser wrote a review of mixed feelings for The New York Times Sunday Review. At least Moser is honest compared to the two reviewers we assessed earlier: he admits that the long books he likes are in some respect simple. (Although I don't know what's simple about Tolstoy'sWar and Peace, which is interspersed with 20-40 pages long excursions on how to write about history.) A common complaint is voiced in this review as well, one with which I cannot entirely disagree: there are long sex scenes that become tiresome because they lose their mood of being a scene about sex. Although, I’m sure this isn't an accident: such an approach to scenes, which seem to start out as one thing and then turn out to be something else can serve to make the reader experience what the characters often go through. For example the feeling of meeting a friend and then realizing that one is threatened, or begged for a favour, or warned.

Tibor Fischer lines up firmly with the superficials, in his review published in The Guardian: "I say Nádas couldn't tell a story about an Englishman, an Irishman and a Frenchman walking into a bar." I do not know what the problem is with these reviewers, but they do not like overt realism (all of them refer to Tolstoy as a writer of great novels, but none to Dostoevsky). Fischer also seems to oppose the way Nadas approaches his topics and condemns the attitude of speaking out an all matters political. Surely one does not have to read a book dealing with family stories that happened in a period when one could not withdrew from being influenced. But then why write a review about it?

And now to cherish what’s good: Parallel Stories is a novel which tries to capture the complicated history of the central region of Europe, and tries to make the reader feel that all those problems, those conflicts, those clashes of interests, those horrors have had no solutions and are still present today. It is not about resolutions, not about happiness, not about finding out who the murderer is. It is about the frustration of having to leave with the past, with pressure, with resentment and remorse towards your fellow countrymen, and not being able to do much about it. And that's reality. If one isn't interested in a book that helps you better understand these times, while at the same time guiding you through many emotional conflicts, love affairs, family losses and drama, then you shouldn’t pick it up. You’ll miss out on some of the most captivating, psychologically accurate and tension filled scenes ever written. If one can enjoy these things, this book is an excellent read.