THE HISTORY OF MEMORIES by Peter Nadas, Random House, $340 That simple, yes, everything was that simple.' Such a straightforward sentence to conclude what is, unquestionably, a mesmerisingly complex and ambitious book.
Peter Nadas' formidably intelligent novel spans 700 pages, several decades, and the cities of Budapest and Berlin. He makes clear it is a novel, not a book of his own memories.
Funny, sad, trying, exhausting, it runs the full gamut of conflicting emotions - and ultimately, the result is the quintessential European modern novel, similar in vein to Patrick Suskind's Perfume.
As the narrator says: 'There is no memory without the recurrence of emotions, or conversely, every moment of lived experience is also an allusion to a former experience - that is what memory is.' I started it and for the first 100 pages it left me unmoved. Then, without warning, my attention surrendered to it and its exhilaration kicked in - in the most quiet and understated way.
Undoubtedly, this translation from the original Hungarian text, in which you can almost sense the painstaking consideration given to ensuring the correct English word is substituted, helps.
Yet at times the prose tends overly towards the self-indulgent, so that short sentences become unnecessarily long, and the essence of what the author is trying to say wallows in a sea of text.