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The Kossuth award-winning writer was invited by the Literarisches Colloquium Berlin (LCB) which is well known for its translation workshops. The public reading was organised in conjunction with public radio Deutschlandfunk. The reading and a roundtable discussion that followed will be broadcast later.
The critic Tilman Krause and the poet, writer and essayist Joachim Sartorius spoke with Nádas in front of an audience of about 70. Parallel Stories was published in Hungary in 2005 and in Germany this February. The German hosts both stressed that Parallel Stories was a bleak but very entertaining story, free of nostalgia, about the decline and disappearance of the bourgeoisie in Hungary.
Krause noted that the extremely long novel makes readers work hard but those that manage to get through it would be awarded with a great experience. He added that he was rather biased when starting off the novel because Nádas?s previous work A Book of Memories was a favourite of his. He said he had finished the new novel in two weeks and it was indeed worth the effort to get through the ?dense and concentrated? text.
Sartorius said that in addition to parallels, the book also offered a ?masterful depiction? of transition and the accumulation of layers. It breaks away from the conventions that readers conditioned by novels from the 19th and early 20th century are accustomed to, he said. As a result, reading the first few paragraphs is a somewhat ?frustrating? experience, but once the reader manages to become submerged in the text, it becomes a captivating experience, a structure ruled by chaos, just like real life, he added.
Nádas said he wrote the book for a period of eighteen years and he attempted to show the disintegration of bourgeoisie lifestyle through ?two pinnacles of modernity: psychoanalysis and Bauhaus architecture?.
The 1,728-page novel was translated by Christina Viragh and published by Rowohlt.
