Nádas told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung that he could not and did not want to summarise the more than 1,700-page book, adding that even its form was ambiguous.
?Is Parallel Histories a family novel? Yes and no. An adventure novel? Yes and no. A crime story? Yes! And no!? he said.
Nádas called the structure of the book ?chaotic?.
?I am a child of the Enlightenment and children of the Enlightenment do not caer to see the world as chaotic. They try to put the chaotic features of the world in order?but I think they do this to no avail. The world is chaotic, thus the structure of the novel is chaotic. For me, reality was more important than literary conventions.?
Nádas said he himself did not know the identity of a corpse that appears at the beginning of the novel.
?I have two hypotheses?but I, too, can only collect clues. I didn?t want to do as they do on television every evening?to reconnoitre an event,? he said.
?We have in ourselves a desire to uncover secret things, without any connection, but regardless of our circumstances, this doesn?t always work,? he added.
The novel took Nádas 18 years to complete, which works out to roughly one quarter of a page a day.
Nádas conceded that his daily output was not very big, but added that much of the material he wrote did not end up in the book.
Writing for Die Welt, the critic Tilman Krause said Nádas had ?woven together the instinctive side of the 20 century in a gigantic narrative fabric?.
Krause pegged Nádas to become the next Hungarian writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Source: Hungarian News Agency (MTI)
